“The ability to capture momentary action and fleeting facial expression has perhaps been the most exciting aspect of photography in modern times, even when the images that are produced are indistinct or blurry. During the medium’s earliest days, such images were considered inept—a fault of equipment or photographer. With the development at the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth of hand-held small cameras and faster lenses, photographers were given a wider range of expressive means, with both indefinition and sharpness becoming acceptable as attributes of the photographic image. Paolo Tosti is among the large number of photographers who consider focus—whether the image will be sharp or soft–to be a function of ones reaction to the subject. Because he is attracted to crowds and fast-moving events such as bull fights in Pamplona and palios in Siena—events that in truth have been documented innumerable times–, he makes use of both crisp definition and blurry indistinctiveness to render visible fleeting action and to suggest the energy produced on such occasions. It is not the event itself that he wishes to depict, but the emotion generated by animal and human participants that excites his interest and transforms his work from documentation to personal expression. Tosti is entranced also by the raw emotions visible among the onlookers at such activities. The excitement and involvement of viewers caught up in the moment—at times to the exclusion of all other matters–engage his interest and result in images that often encapsulate the frenzy that such events create. In capturing uncontrolled gestures and grimaces as well as less frenetic scenes, his work seems to suggest both his enjoyment of the spectacle and, at the same time, a degree of discomfort with the public’s conduct. In their revelation of an underlying emotional essence, his images transcend the limits of documentation to become examples of expressive art. ” Naomi Rosenblum