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MIRIAM AND IRA D. WALLACH ART GALLERY
Pictures for Books: Photographs by Thomas Roma
Text by Susan Kismaric.
Like so many of the best photographers, Thomas Roma has a flair for thinking in book form. His first book, the limited-edition and handbound volume Brooklyn Gardens (1980), affirmed this flair from the outset of his career, and over the past 30 years Roma has published 13 volumes, always composing and sequencing his classical and modernist vision of contemporary life with care and thought. Roma’s concern for bookmaking accords with his general autodidacticism: he is self-taught to the degree that he even designs and builds his own cameras and lighting equipment. Pictures for Books is the first retrospective volume on Roma. It gathers selections from four previous publications: Found in Brooklyn (1996), Come Sunday (1996), Sicilian Passage (2003) and On Three Pillars: Torah, Worship and the Practice of Loving Kindness, The Synagogues of Brooklyn (2007). Shot in black and white, the sequences included here display two signature Roma traits: a quietly steady and penetrative observation of the close-at-hand, and a fondness for the diverse neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the borough in which Roma was born and continues to reside. Pictures for Books is full of images that capture daily life (both in Brooklyn and abroad) as it opens out into moments of capacious quietude.
Featured image is reproduced from Pictures for Books: Photographs by Thomas Roma.
"The painter and critic Fairfield Porter once wrote about the work of the recently deceased landscape painter Albert York, 'Certainly part of the strong emotional appeal of these paintings [is that Mr. York] is not clever, and in no sense superior to the nature of his medium or the nature of the subject but that he is at one with both.' The same might be said about the photographs of Thomas Roma. He relies on photography's mysterious ability to describe, with unmatched verisimilitude, his imaginative treatment of humble detail, and adds his element of earnestness. A little earnestness can be productive. It implies that the answers are unknown and are to be discovered in an exploration of the world."
FORMAT: Pbk, 8.5 x 10 in. / 136 pgs / 112 duotone. LIST PRICE: U.S. $35.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $40 ISBN: 9781884919251 PUBLISHER: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery AVAILABLE: 4/30/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery. Text by Susan Kismaric.
Like so many of the best photographers, Thomas Roma has a flair for thinking in book form. His first book, the limited-edition and handbound volume Brooklyn Gardens (1980), affirmed this flair from the outset of his career, and over the past 30 years Roma has published 13 volumes, always composing and sequencing his classical and modernist vision of contemporary life with care and thought. Roma’s concern for bookmaking accords with his general autodidacticism: he is self-taught to the degree that he even designs and builds his own cameras and lighting equipment. Pictures for Books is the first retrospective volume on Roma. It gathers selections from four previous publications: Found in Brooklyn (1996), Come Sunday (1996), Sicilian Passage (2003) and On Three Pillars: Torah, Worship and the Practice of Loving Kindness, The Synagogues of Brooklyn (2007). Shot in black and white, the sequences included here display two signature Roma traits: a quietly steady and penetrative observation of the close-at-hand, and a fondness for the diverse neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the borough in which Roma was born and continues to reside. Pictures for Books is full of images that capture daily life (both in Brooklyn and abroad) as it opens out into moments of capacious quietude.
