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.

History

Roma, Thomas

Americas

W.W.Norton&Company

With the help of a photographic essay, the eminent child psychologist and Pulitzer Prize-winner records the thoughts, aspirations, worries, and reflections on aging of eleven elderly, single men and women, capturing their dignity and courage.

Old and on Their Own

Arts & Photography

Coles, Robert

Harris, Alex

Photography & Video

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Brooklyn was the place of Thomas Roma's boyhood, a place of lush gardens and expanses of white cement, where the old country and the new world merged. In these photographs of streets, passages, abandoned building-sites and gardens, taken over a period of 20 years, Roma reproduces images of the neighbourhoods that shaped him, showing aspects of the city which are by turns amusing, forlorn, and surreal.

Come Sunday: Photographs by Thomas Roma

Museum of Modern Art

Photographs of people at Brooklyn's Sunset Park are accompanied by an interview with the artist about his work

SUNSET PARK PB (Photographers at Work)

Individual Artists

Smithsonian

Higher Ground

Distributed Art Pub Inc

“Two years ago, when I was eight years old, my dad asked me if I wanted to work on a project with him. He had an idea that I could write about some of his pictures for a book. I said I would try, but I wasn’t really sure how the project would turn out or even how we would begin.... I began writing this book in January 2000 and wrote the final piece in December 2000. Looking back, I think my dad wanted me to see the world through his eyes from my perspective and write about it…. I feel as if my dad created a world for me by taking pictures. And while I was writing about a picture, I was living in that world. I hope you can come too.” —Giancarlo T. Roma The idea to collaborate on Show &amp; Tell with his son Giancarlo came to famed photographer Thomas Roma after he read his son’s second grade journal and a homemade book he’d written called How to Train Your Dog. Taken with how well Giancarlo expressed himself and how clear he was about his feelings, Roma asked his son if he would be interested in collaborating on a book. Giancarlo agreed, and after discussing several possibilities, they decided that Giancarlo would write about dad’s Brooklyn photographs—from his earliest days as a photographer in 1973 through today. They began with a box of fifty photographs, and edited according to Giancarlo’s preferences, turning the process of creating the book into a dialog between father and son, photographer and writer. The result is Show &amp; Tell, a charming look at life through a father’s eyes from a child’s perspective. “What an extra-special collaboration: son and father introducing us to their picture neighborhood!! Bravo to both!!” —Fred Rogers creator and host, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

Show & Tell

Roma, Giancarlo T.

powerHouse Books

“When they ask me, as of late they frequently do, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.” —William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams made his mark on the world as a legendary modernist poet, but he filled an equally significant role on a local level in his native New Jersey—as a doctor. Over the first half of the twentieth century, Williams built a successful practice as a pediatrician and OB-GYN, and while some of his patients made the journey to his office in the affluent town of Rutherford, many more were privileged with house calls. House Calls with William Carlos Williams, MD is a collaborative effort by child psychiatrist Robert Coles and photographer Thomas Roma to retrace Dr. Williams’ rounds, which included patients from Rutherford all the way north to Paterson. Coles, an early fan of the doctor’s literary work, befriended Williams as a young man, and in the early 50s was invited to come along on many of these outings; his experiences are recounted here in engaging first-person anecdotes. Roma was given access to the patients’ addresses in 2001, and plotted a route he would travel with his camera over the course of the next five years; his quiet, contemplative photographs of the streets Dr. Williams walked provide a striking visual counterpoint to Coles’ text. Selections of Williams’ poetry are reproduced throughout, including excerpts from his five-part epic, Paterson. The result is an immersive experience, in which the reader may travel side-by-side with Williams, listening and learning from the famed poet, doctor, and mentor.

House Calls With William Carlos Williams, MD

For over two years, photographer Thomas Roma mounted his camera on an 8 foot pole and projected it out and over the dogs at a dusty Brooklyn dog run in order to photograph their shadows. Plato’s Dogs is simultaneously foreign and familiar in its depiction of its subjects. On one hand, the dogs look little like themselves in the pictures, distorted and featureless in their silhouettes. But on the other, they appear truer to their essential self, their primitive substance and oddly—given the misleading nature of the shadow in Plato’s cave allegory—closer to their Platonic form. Looking through the pictures, one shadow wilder than the next, it’s hard not to come to view the canines' shade as their spirit—an outward projection of how they see themselves for those precious hours when they’re off the leash at the park, self-actualizing. (Notably, in their obscured rendering, their collars disappear.) Some resemble fearsome wolves, some stoic water buffalo, and some a new breed of creature altogether, but never a pet, never the animal that will later sleep at the foot of your bed.

Plato's Dogs

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roma, Thomas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Roma, Thomas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Roma, Thomas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Found in Brooklyn

Old and on Their Own

Found in Brooklyn

Come Sunday: Photographs by Thomas Roma

SUNSET PARK PB (Photographers at Work)

Higher Ground

Show & Tell

House Calls With William Carlos Williams, MD

Plato's Dogs