Aftermath #32 - Detroit Photograph - Limited Edition of 5

Thomas is a photographer with five decades of image-making experience, including a period of printmaking (mainly lithography). Having worked over the years in all formats using 35mm to 8x10 view cameras, and various processes (primarily standard silver processing) Thomas' technique today is relatively simple and straightforward digital photography and pigment ink jet printing. Thomas is based in southwast Michigan, USA, and photographs mainly there and in New York City and in Arizona. WHY I PHOTOGRAPH Photography helps me rationalize visual chaos. I frame a scene to create a composition, almost as a formalist or modernist of a century ago may have. My primary impulse is to compress space & distance by inducing near/far tension, or to flatten space into an arrangement of shapes and colors (or shades of gray) on a visually flat field. When I'm able to capture together objects of disparate quality and/or meaning (as I perceive them) thereby to induce some additional thematic tension, then so much the better. In some pictures, the captured objects/subjects may also hold some symbolic content, whether part of a personal iconography, or of a more universally or culturally recognized meaning. A small proportion of my works are comprised of multiple images printed or matted together as diptychs, triptychs, or multiples, but in the main, I want each composition to be self-contained by drawing in and holding the viewer's interest. This is accomplished with dynamic compositions that set up a visual circulation within the frame, or sometimes with more static, even symmetric compositions that are so completely centered, that the eye seems barely able to escape. I am, in a word, composing. I compose with the camera at the time of capture, further refining the composition on the computer [LightRoom]. It may be at this post-capture phase that I recognize and try to exploit any symbolic, emotional, or psychological content that I may have subconsciously baked into the picture. But my goal is always to recognize that content at the time of capture and compose accordingly. I've dabbled in, and intend to further explore, the assembly of compositions that have themes, messages, or even story lines that build on the visual aspect of the composition with emotionally freighted subjects, including persons. Even simple techniques, the visual and contextual variety can be infinite. And this is the joy of photography.