Thomas Vandermeulen

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 pro...

Bachelor of Science in Studio Art majoring in Printmaking & Photography, 1982; Western Michigan University; Kalamazoo, MI
(studied with Curtis Rhodes [lithography] and Paul Robert [intaglio])
Graduate Studies in Art History; 1984-1987; Arizona State University; Tempe, AZ.
(studied with Bill Jay [History of Photography])
Graduate Studies in Art History; Fall 1987; Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; New York, NY
Masters of Science in Accounting; 2004; Eastern Michigan University; Ypsilanti, MI

2023

Awagami International Minitaure Print Exhibition, 2023 - Honorable Mention; Sept 20, 2023, juried group exhibition

Midwest Center for Photographic Art, October 2023, Group Exhibition, "Likeness"

Midwest Center for Photographic Art, July 2023, Group Exhibition, "Blue"