Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Tom Drahos’ background is plural and transversal.  First there is Prague, where he obtained a degree in graphic arts and began studies at the National Academy of Cinema, which he later finished at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques («Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies») in Paris. The latter has since become the Femis and is the official school of French Cinema. This rich educational background is living proof of his curiosity, which has only grown over the years. I first met Tom Drahos when I was a second year student at the Fine Arts School in Rennes. I had the enourmous privilege of having him as my tutor during four years.  This artist taught me to have high expectations and develop a real taste for the manipulation of the different parameters specific to photography. He made me realize the importance of critical analysis and perspective; and above all, he taught me to take my time and accept to learn from my doubts and mistakes. After such a previleged experience I became a professor of photography myself. My dialogues with Tom Drahos have not ceased, our teacher/student relationship has evolved into a friendship based on profound mutual respect. Over and above our friendship, this artist’s work demands the utmost respect because of its coherence and pertinence. Throughout his career, he has not bothered with norms; whether with his feature film «METROSHIMA» shown at the Cannes cinema festival in 1978 or his latest series, he continually contradicts the certainties of representation. His love of construction and deconstruction of visual habits is sometimes tinted with irony and the absurd, such as in his «METAMORPHOSES»; even 30 years later, these domestic stagings have a certain poetic power and energy of strangeness. A mixture of documents and playful constructions, this series is a tribute to those pioneers who made it possible to free the image from its uniquely mechanical aspect. He constantly mistreats the image (piercing, tearing, folding, irradiating) and constantly questions his technical abilities and visual expectations. His quest into the status of the image has led him to completely destroy it, burning it to ashes, like a metaphor of photographical life. He has had a perpetual need to disrupt the so-called limits of the photographical image, as the latter becomes both object and subject of his experiments. In both «Jaina» and «Exit», the image itself becomes an outsider and as an intermediate space, it frees itself from the document and from the present; it becomes an experimental object that is primitive and loose, and a work of photography is thus born in movement. Tom Drahos is a versatile and postmodern artist (cinema, video, photo, installations, cdrom) who never settles for known territories; he purposely goes off the beaten track. In its material and other states, he places photography in a perpetual movement of experimentation.  Creation as an act of doconstruction. Thank you Tom and keep that corsair spirit alive. Tom Drahos, (1947, fr), born in Prague, lives and works between Paris and southwestern France. www.tom-drahos.com (translation ramona Bourhis)