MARQUIS DE SADE

Trained as a photographer, filmmaker and visual artist, Tom Drahos works with photography in a way that may seem iconoclastic to some, but which is surely one of the most enjoyable ways of questioning photography and the photographic image. It is indeed in a hierarchy that has never been denied since his first series of reports on the Champs Elysées (1966-1972) to those on the Louvre (2003) that the artist questions what photography is, that is to say what it is not as an image and what it can be as an object and vice versa.

If today, the Gens d'Images have awarded Tom Drahos the Archimboldo prize for his Exit series (2003), it is because this prize, awarded to a work on and with the digital medium, goes, for the photographer, well beyond the question of the digital. It is indeed one of the last photographic occurrences that the artist proposes to us in front of what the photographic image misses of the real, in front of what the photographic matter says or not of the individual and collective memory, of our relation to time, of our belonging to the human community of here and elsewhere.