Tony Baghlali, known by the pseudonym
The Focalister, is a young French-Algerian photographer born in Dijon.
Self-taught, he trained and specialised in analog photography in Montreal
(Canada), where he lived for several years.
Using photography as
an art form, his work straddles the line between auteur and documentary
photography.
In his series of
images « ma cité brille » that he began in 2019 in Chenôve, the
photographer explores the irrepressible desire to be elsewhere, the idea he had
of it and, in opposition to it his deep attachment to the neighbourhood in
which he grew up.
He chose to recount
personal, sometimes fanciful accounts of his suburban youth in search of
elsewhere, while opening up a debate on subjects such as hybrid identity,
mental confinement and the taboo of male sensitivity.
His approach to
documentary photography is slightly at odds with tradition creating images with
a poetic resonance.
He reveals and
embraces beauty by subtly decentring it towards an elsewhere, seeking to convey
a sense of place rather than an objective vision of reality.
"His refusal to separate the rural from the urban creates an
expanded universe in which analogies and new possibilities emerge.
The work presented also suggests a cinematic influence, both
in the choice of images and in their treatment. Portraits, landscapes,
close-ups and abstractions echo each other and form part of a fragmented
narrative that is nonetheless in the same world.
By opting exclusively for black and white, the artist
deliberately places his images in a form of timelessness like the dream scenes
in Andrei Tarkov's films : a state of in-between or suspended time ("sealed",
as the director would say), mixing past and present, memory and fiction ". Hugo Pernet
