www.sofisticati.com October 2009
Rendez Vous at “Chez Jeannette”. The old fashion bistro may be in one of the most distressed neighbourhoods of Paris. But it is now the haunt of the "bobo" (bourgeois-bohemians) as they say here. However, successful interior and design photographer, Tommaso Sartori, is nothing of a bourgeois.Instead he has everything (or almost everything) of a bohemian, perhaps this is the reason why he would like to take “romantic” pictures. “Instead – he says – some people consider them cold and dark. But this is the reason why they call me”. And who is looking for him? Cassina, Flos, B&B, Ford, Wallpaper, GQ, Vogue and many more.
Barilla was the first company who trusted his vision: “I was 11 years old. Sometimes I still sell some pictures that I took during a reportage that I did in Paris during those years”. In fact, Tommaso started to discover the world behind the camera when he was just a child: “The passion, at nine years old. How? [by]Arguing for one year with my parents to buy me a camera, a Zenit TTL, it was awesome”. L'Enfant prodige Tommaso followed an uncharacteristic path, his first artistic pictures received an honourable mention from the Biennale in Turin (“I was 17 years old”), then as art director of a magazine for hair stylists: “It was named Vanità. It [Vanità] was very innovative and launched many photographers”. Afterwards at the age of twenty he entered into the Vogue galaxy, and also worked for Wallpaper. He lived between Milan and London and got his inspiration from great masters such as Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, David Hockney and Man Ray.
Like Man Ray, Tommaso lives in Paris nowadays, where he did his first reportage. The important companies who seek him out in the Ville Lumière, are those who want to intrigue their potential clients with his atypical vision for their products. A style that is hard to define: “It is the others that are trying to define it, but the real talent maybe lays in being recognizable and identifiable. I would define my style as geometrical and maybe recognized for my use of light and for the clean images that I make”. Elements that have an impact even on the non-commercial pictures that Tommaso takes travelling around the world or simply stealing instants in the city streets or even ideas from the sets: “I am working on a project about the concept of black and the sadness that it can cause in the landscape, for the observer”. A theme from a restless romantic, who only recently began to go over the pictures that he has taken in order to understand their meaning.
By Alessandro Grandesso