Our photographer is comfortable in his own skin, and his skin is comfortable with him. There is nothing of the twisted Almodoraviana of his latest good film which I could detect in him: relaxed, loose, joyful, there is joie de vivre here –feel free to nativize the foreign language as you deem appropriate– in this accented son of the catholic mother of civilizations, the Mediterranean, no doubt, thousands of miles away from Calvinist or Presbyterian-inspired fulminations of right and wrong in spoken language and visual imagery. Toscani would not be patient with the rules and regulations taped to the broomsticks and umbrellas attached to the spine of the self-appointed moralists sticking out from underneath the coat for extra verticality and rigidity. Toscani does not play stiff upper lip or hard, neither hard to get, or hard at being playful with some touches of theater. He is naturally smart, Italian in the good sense of the term, with so much Berlusconiana flying around, mocking and self-mocking, gently always, about the certainties, typologies and labels of identity that you may wish to throw at him: Italianness, Europe, Old World, fashion photographer… This guy can do high culture, if need be. But he is most natural at popular or commercial photography, and that is what he showed at MIT that night. He is the happy provider of glossy images of the commodity form. His “naturalized” professional circumstance: the inescapable world of consumerism.
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He called himself a photographer, without adjectival markers (fashion, landscape, etc.). He put himself on the testimonial and documentarian side of social and creative things, but is this entirely the case? He confesses to liking changing the subject matter, and you get the sense that the pleasure lies in the variation game. Keep the image superficial or read in it as much as you want. Up to you.
[Read it all here]

(by Fernando Gómez Herrero, CULTURE BITES)