Boissy-l’Aillerie, France, 1954. Lives and works in Mayet and Paris.
He studied architecture in Paris from 1973 to 1979 (DESA). From 1976, he developed a type of photographic work where issues of space and scale play a key role. The photographic process, its potential features, its limitations, its relationship with reality would be a constant feature throughout the series covering objects, the body, clothing... Since 2004, he has been teaching at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris. Numerous retrospectives at the Museum Folkwang of Essen (1997), at the European house of photography (2011) have paid tribute to the originality of a work that offers a new outlook on the nature of photography. When he made these images in Syria, in the suburbs of Damascus, in 2002, it was the first time that Patrick Tosani had left his photography workshop. Of this rare moment in time, there remain some unique images of the faces of children taken during a visit to a school in a Palestinian refugee camp. A succession of melancholic faces, views of bland classrooms and playgrounds pose the question of how history is to be represented using photography.