Thomas Roma

Found in Brooklyn

Roma's photographs pay homage to the diverse, expansive, and truly unique place that is Brooklyn.

Brooklyn is often thought of as a world of its own. For the photographer Thomas Roma, Brooklyn is the place of his boyhood, a place of lush gardens and expanses of white cement, of the merging of old country and new world. In these photographs, made over a period of twenty years, Roma finds images of the neighborhoods that shaped him.

Roma is a rare photographer who, without resorting to technical gimmicks, offers us pure photography. He looks directly into the mundane and from it creates poetry, mystery, and surprise. An old man sits in his undershirt surrounded by the flowering beauty he has created. A boy lies on an overpass, dreaming, as cars rush beneath him. Roma's pictures take us through streets and passages, abandoned lots and backyards, to give us glimpses of Brooklyn that are at turns amusing, forlorn, stunning, and surreal.
"Roma's work is about describing unprepossessing materials beautifully, in the manner of Eugene Atget, Walker Evans, and, most immediately, Lee Friedlander."—Andy Grundberg, New York Times

Thomas Roma's work has been widely exhibited and is in permanent collections of major museums in the United States and abroad. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist and writer who has spent his life doing documentary work. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts.