CGD23

Hard to identify the most exceptional season in the recent dominant period of Marie Tomanová’s work. The years when she was able to transform a single personal series capturing the tremors of an era (Young American, 2019) into a career of photographic galleries and various gigs for the cultural industry on both sides of the Atlantic seems to have surprisingly quickly faded into the past, yet it has left a pleasant glow – both with experts in the field as well as with the artist herself. As if every year she added a new milestone. There is certainly something worth noting in that this natural queen of the social network (and socialization as such), furthermore at a time when communication has become ever more complicated (especially for the up-and-coming generation), got the chance to work on a global campaign for Meta/Instagram. Tomanová’s candid personality and her youthful, vital expressivity – which however hides a deeper sense of experience – in turn fosters trust in the younger generation, who willingly put themselves in her hands (and she always chooses the shiest ones). Instagram is also a medium which was taking off around the time when Tomanová landed in New York – a photo app based around ephemeral moments, amateurish pseudo-analog aesthetics, and the polaroid effect of the 2010s. And Tomanová stays more or less faithful to the small device and her subjective, snapshot view from below, her eye, able to both look and not at the same time, has developed into a professional vision capable of scaling and styling projects for various clients like Nike, The New York Magazine or the Los Angeles Times. If years ago we wrote that Marie Tomanová “is interested in photography while paying minimum attention to the medium,” today she is fully in control of that medium. Being an artist whose work often explores the auto-portrait, it makes sense that she has now become the focus of photographers at gala evenings of the world’s creative crème de la crème. Ryan McGinley wrote the foreword for Young American with the generosity of a mentor, and at the GQ’s Global Creativity Awards it was no longer really clear who was trying to get a picture with whom.

Michal Nanoru