Friday, January 9, 2015 Q & A with Thomas Roma Thomas Roma by Lee Friedlander Thomas Roma is a photographer based in Brooklyn. • BA: It sounds like you connected with my friend Matt recently in Paris and also Istanbul. He's a great guy. I'm wondering if you had a chance to shoot photos on either of those trips. TR: Yes, we met Matt in Istanbul and then hooked up again in Paris - He's a great guy. I have really enjoyed our short new friendship and I'm sure we'll be friends for the duration. No, I did not shoot. In fact, I only photograph when that's what I am doing. Even in the earliest days when I was associated with a group of photographers who would walk down 5th Ave or across 57th St., Leicas at the ready, I didn't carry a camera. I should also say here as a side note that my cell phone, which is an old Nokia flip phone, doesn't have a camera feature. My phone has no camera either. This is only the second phone I ever had. When my first one stopped working my wife took me to a Verizon store and I asked the clerk if he had a camera with a phone inside. When he said no, I said okay then give me a phone without a camera in it. He couldn't understand why I wouldn't want it for the same price and I had to explain I like to keep my appliances separate. I'm happy to meet someone that shares my point of view. You make your own cameras so you could always add your own phone to them if you want… Yes, I do make my own cameras but I think I am stuck with Nokia. So when you're home, what have you been photographing recently? I'm always wandering around Brooklyn photographing. And many of my photographs are made very close to home. Very, as in a couple hundred feet or so. That said, I also concentrate on specific projects that I can devote my attention to. And always more than one thing at a time. So, about a year ago I stopped photographing in a place in Prospect Park Brooklyn where men go to cruise each other (portraits and landscapes) but while I was doing that I was also photographing in another park on the other end of Brooklyn, a dog park, photographing the shadows that dogs make. That ended when the city decided to tear the park up for renovations. It's been closed for months now. So I had to stop. And most recently I've been photographing in a neighborhood in Brooklyn that has undergone an amazing transformation in the last decade. What was until recently a very mixed neighborhood is now entirely a neighborhood of recent immigrants from China. This happens over and over again in Brooklyn and I am continually fascinated by it. But I am also dealing with another recent phenomenon, another Brooklyn one, which is a real estate boom. Suddenly Brooklyn, much of which was 1, 2 and 3 family homes is now being covered with high rise luxury apartments and even hotels. Something that was unheard of only 20 years ago. So in dealing with this recent fact, I've decided to try and make landscapes from the roofs of these buildings. I'm curious to see what Brooklyn looks like from up there. Of the projects you mention the only photos I've seen are the dog park shadows. I'm curious what drew you to that subject matter. Why did you decide to shoot them from above, and is that your first photo project you've shot without your eye behind the lens? For the dogs, I was inspired by Constantino Martinez who we just call "Tino" - He's the standard poodle that's lived with us for the last nine years. I'm avoiding saying "my dog" because it is hard to imagine owning another creature but that is what I meant. Here's what happened. The work in the Vale of Cashmere required me spending a lot of time in the Park, often just walking around (cruising) until I encountered someone who would be interested in being photographed. I'd get there in the early afternoon and things didn't really heat up until closer to sundown and depending on the time of the year, I would spend a lot of time not photographing if you could imagine. During the years I spent going there, it was also a bit of a dangerous place, many muggings and even a murder and, let's face it, my presence wasn't always welcomed. So to be clear, I had to approach men and sort of introduce myself - I wasn't interested in outing anyone - and the vast majority of times, my offer to photograph them was rejected and sometimes angrily so. from Mondo Cane, 2014, Thomas Roma Which brings me to the dog park. Early mornings my wife and I would take Tino to this wild rather large (for a city) enclosed park on the opposite side of Brooklyn in Bay Ridge. There was something about the release of all this energy, something about photographing where frankly the stakes were much lower, and the anxiety level zero that made it irresistible. Because I was there early in the morning I couldn't help but notice these amazing shadows, how much like wild animals these otherwise lovable creatures looked. So I found a way to photograph them which turned out to be with a camera on the end of an eight foot long pole from above. I actually started photographing from above much earlier, back in the mid 1990s, I began something I was calling "Interior Topography" and I'd ask my neighbors to allow me to come in their homes with this enormous apparatus that I cobbled together that consisted of an 8x10 sized tripod with a geared head and a long boom that I counterbalanced and looked like something you'd see on a movie set. I would photograph above the dining room table after a meal or above bedrooms before the beds were made. I'm not sure it ever quite worked out how I wanted. I also spent a fair amount of time trying to make pictures with a finger print camera. It was a camera that shot one to one on the film and I own a bunch of them. The whole camera would be pressed up against whatever needed to be photographed (fingerprints). I started doing that about the same time, something about the forensic nature of photography. Both of those, what should I call them, projects, kind of led to the work I did in Criminal Court (looking through the view finder though) called Enduring Justice which is a PowerHouse book. That may not make sense, but I should add that I begin many projects that don't immediately pan out. Mostly because they are nonsense. I do a lot of things to give myself an excuse to leave the house where I am probably too comfortable. I don't understand the fingerprint camera. Is it basically like a hand held scanner? Imagine a shoebox with an opening the size of the film (2 1/4 x 3 1/4) cut out of one of the short sides. They were originally made by Folmer & Schwing, the folks who made Graflex and Speed Graphic cameras. Just behind the opening are four light bulbs that illuminate the area to be photographed. Since it is an extreme close up (1:1) the box has to be pretty long. If you Google image "Graflex fingerprint camera" they pop up. Sounds weird but interesting... The reason I asked about not putting your eye behind the camera -a sort of hipshot?- is I'm curious about that technique and the conscious lack of control it implies. Some of your photos (e.g., Found In Brooklyn) seem like the opposite end of that, with very precise positioning. I guess my question is, do you welcome that lack of control and the element of chance it injects? And maybe more broadly, how big of a role does chance/fate play in your creative life? Or in life in general? Warning: BIG questions. But not too big hopefully. In the case of the original interior topography work and the fingerprint camera, yes it was very much about the relief of not having to look through the camera. But I wouldn't exactly say it was about introducing chance. In both cases the things I was photographing were static. There is a lot more element of chance walking down the street photographing in the flow and flux of life in any city whether you are looking through the viewfinder or not. Thanks for noticing the framing in Found In Brooklyn. It is a BIG question, not just what part chance plays but what it is we are actually doing when we make a photograph, what can we do, what do we have control over? The frame relates to the form of the photograph. So getting back to not looking through the camera, I am interested in what photographs mean and they mean something because they look like something. Look, I don't care how good a blues song is, it's not going mean much to someone who never had the blues in the first place. Works of art are valuable because they remind us of something significant.