PATRICK TOSANI
French
Patrick Tosani is one of France’s leading photo-
graphers. His career has been founded on a serial
practice that abolishes borders between photogra-
phy, painting, and sculpture, and since the early
1980s, Tosani has developed numerous series of
large-scale color photographs. Each of these series
is made up of precisely cropped, slightly varying
close-ups of interesting yet mundane objects. Items
including fingernails, spoons, scalps, drum skins,
levels, shoe heels, circuits, and the soles of feet have
served Tosani as subjects, and he documents these
objects on a scale and with a typological exactitude
that renders them extraordinary.
Tosani was born in 1954 at Boissy-l’Aillerie.
After studying architecture, and following the
advice of his art teacher, Tosani took up photo-
graphy, which seemed an ideal medium for his
interest in investigating how to represent space.
His first series reflects this concern as well as
the problems of how to manipulate and create a
fictional narrative by means of common, well-
described objects. In an early work Tosani con-
ceives blow-ups of ice cubes that feature small
figures of sportsmen. Most often, these sportsmen
seem stopped in mid-movement, inferring that the
body does not move within an urban architecture
but depends on an uncertain organic architecture.
This idea will be used again by Tosani in his next
series entitledPalais, Forum, Are`nes. It is no longer
about the body per se, but images of architecture
and architectural environments cut from newspa-
pers. These cut-outs are also encased in ice cubes,
however, an essential if not existential variation
occurs. Behind the ice cube, a candle flame ap-
pears, creating a dramatic and appealing image as
the photographs fix the ice’s melting while the
architecture seems to burn from the inside. Refer-
ring to a temporal fiction and a narration about
image loss, Tosani captures simultaneous acts of
destruction to create his photographs.
Tosani’s 1984–1985 Portraits emphasize the
inherent paradoxes of photographic image (opacity
and visibility, subject and object, the freezing of the
instant within movement, and so on). They were
obtained through projecting a blurred image of a
head on a surface upon which Braille characters are
superimposed. The photographed signs thus lose
their usefulness, and refer to an inability to read or
to describe the photographed man, made all the
more frustrating by the fact the work is identified
as a portrait.
In his work in general Tosani weaves together
reflections about appearance and surfaces. The ice
cube lets us briefly see a face, but this face is blurred
by the melting of ice; so-called portraits offer but a
blurred vision of a face and a further impossibility
of presenting Braille, which cannot be touched, as it
is merely an image of Braille. Tosani elaborates his
assertion about specificity of the photographic
medium in comparison with painting and sculpture.
In one of his first series,Pluie(Rain), he focused on
drops falling from a fountain, creating an equiva-
lence with rain, not as a climatological element but
as a sculpture. Photography becomes the tool that
permits one to modulate forms of ‘‘rain.’’
The series entitled NiveauxandCuille`res,both
from 1988,Talons de chaussures,from1987and
Circuits, from 1989 respond to the same modes:
accumulation, change of level, and a diversion of
objects through their representation. For instance,
the spoon is metamorphosed, for in the picture, the
handle is not shown. Thus from a kitchen tool, the
spoon is transformed into a mirror, a surface on
which the light is reflected. In the seriesNiveaux,
also photographed on neutral background, only a
bubble can be made out. These pictures suggest the
borderline between form and frame of the picture.
In the late 1980s Tosani began to focus on the
human body or metaphors for the body. The series
featuring drum skins,Ge ́ographie(1988), suggests a
parallel between two kinds of skins: the skin of the
instrument and the human skin. The 1990 series
entitledOnglesgives a restricted and fragmented
vision of a body through the use of close-up shots
and cropped framing. Tosani raised the specter of
the body as food with the very close-up works of
theVuesseries, which represent pieces of meat, or
in the seriesMillefeuillesandBouche ́es in 1992.
The 1992 series calledTeˆtesdepersonalizes his
models through extreme angle shots that show
only the hair and scalps of the subjects. Tosani
then develops a parallel between his images andTOSANI, PATRICK