EVERY PHOTOGRAPH IS A FRAGMENT OF TIME
Not simply a place, a person or a scene, but a precise moment that existed once and will never exist again.
Every photograph I make carries the exact date and time it was made, down to the second.
Florence · 14 March 2024 · 19:42:17
One place. One second. Gone, except for the photograph.
ABOUT TGS
Tommaso George Sacchi was born in Florence, Italy.
At the age of seven, compelled by something he still cannot quite explain, he borrowed a guest’s camera without asking and brought it to school to photograph his classmates. The camera was returned. The images were not forgotten. Those early photographs remain tucked in a drawer, the beginning of a question he is still pursuing.
He studied architecture at the University of Florence and apprenticed in his father’s studio, a formative period shaped by design, discipline and inherited vision, before relocating to London in 1996, where he co-founded the digital innovation studio UNIT9.
Over two decades in London and five years in New York, he worked at the intersection of technology, creativity and advertising, while privately documenting the world around him.
Patiently. Obsessively. Waiting for digital photography to catch up with his eye.
Today, he devotes himself fully to photography. His work moves between abstract portraiture, intimate nudes and atmospheric low-light scenes, connected by the same instinct: to recognise something fleeting before it disappears.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m not here to explain the work. I can only tell you what it feels like.
I try to photograph the energy released in a shared moment, the invisible current between observer and observed. Something is created, and both people feel it. No one knows where it comes from. It shouldn’t exist. But it does.
I see the golden ratio in everything: light falling on a shoulder, a cracked window, the curve of a jawline. For those with eyes to see, it’s proof of design. A signature. A maker.
None of my photographs are staged. I take what I’m given.
Sometimes I ask the sitter to hold still in low light, but never to pose. I’m not seeking perfection. I’m seeking presence.
Most moments arrive unannounced. I have a heartbeat to react, to lift the camera and click.
These aren’t just photographs. They’re memory capsules, coordinates in time where something real happened and something true passed between us.
When I look at one of these images, it plays again.
The now that was becomes now once more. Everything has changed, and yet, there it is.
Our lives are short. These fragments are what I hold on to.
Proof that I existed. And that they did too.
At least in my hologram.
This is what I share with you.
“You don't take a photograph. You ask, quietly, to borrow it.”
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