Thomas Michael Alleman

American
Bio Statements Books Available

The Gilded Giant
Portfolio Introduction

Thomas Michael Alleman: Midtwon Manhattan, 2004

Thomas Michael Alleman: Lower Manhattan, 2008

Thomas Michael Alleman: East Village, 2004

Thomas Michael Alleman: Midtown Manhattan, 2004

Thomas Michael Alleman: Midtown Manhattan, 2003

Thomas Michael Alleman: Midtown Manhattan, 2008

Thomas Michael Alleman: Greenwich Village, 2002

Thomas Michael Alleman: Coney Island, 2005

Thomas Michael Alleman: Brooklyn Bridge, 2002

Thomas Michael Alleman: Greenwich Village, 2003

Thomas Michael Alleman: Spanish Harlem, 2004

Thomas Michael Alleman: Subway, Chelsea, 2003, 2002

Thomas Michael Alleman: Midtown Manhattan, 2004, 2003

Thomas Michael Alleman: Hudson River, 2005

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Thomas Michael Alleman Bio

Chronology
	Thomas Michael Alleman is a Los Angeles-based editorial, advertising and fine-art photographer. Tom was born and raised in Detroit, where his father was a traveling salesman and his mother was a ceramic artist. After graduating from Michigan State University with a degree in English Literature, he began a 15-year career as a newspaper photographer, winning many local and national awards for his work. Tom continues to shoot assignments for national magazines, as well as for corporate and advertising clients in Southern California. He’s currently finishing a book-length collection of black-and-white “urban landscapes” made in New York, titled “The Gilded Giant”. His book of Los Angeles urban landscapes, "Sunshine & Noir", is finished, and seeks a publisher.

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Awards
1998	Mark Twain Award for Overall Excellence in Photography, Associated Press News Executives Council

1996	Third Place, Photographer of the Year, Pictures of the Year, University of Missouri

1995	Los Angeles Newspaper Photographer of the Year, Greater Los Angeles Area Press Photographer's Association

1995	California Newspaper Photographer of the Year, California Press Photographer's Association

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Solo Exhibitions
2009	Sunshine & Noir, Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR

2008	Sunshine & Noir, Robin Rice Gallery, New York City, NY

2006	Sunshine & Noir, Afterimage Gallery, Dallas, TX

2001	Los Angeles, fin de siecle, Perfect Exposure Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2000	Los Angeles, fin de siecle, Palos Verdes Art Center, Palos Verdes, CA

1999	Los Angeles, fin de siecle, Cerro Cosso College, Ridgecrest, CA

1998	Los Angeles, fin de siecle, University of La Verne, LaVerne, CA

1984	Recent Photographs, LightFantastic Gallery, East Lansing, MI

1983	Recent Photographs, Lansing Community College, Lansing, MI

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Group Exhibitions
2008	This Side of Paradise, Huntington Museum and Library, San Marino, CA

1983	Myths & Masks, Central Michigan University Art Gallery, Mt Pleasant, MI

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Collections

Huntington Museum, San Marino

Kresge Art Gallery, EAST LANSING, MI

Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR

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Bibliography

This Side of Paradise. Jennifer Watts & Claudia Bohn-Spector. Merrill, London, England, 2008 (photo-eye Cat# MR035)

Sweet Sicily. Photographs by Thomas M. Alleman and Linda Lewis, Text by Victoria Granof. Harper Collins, New York, NY, 2001

Best of Photojournalism, 1996. Anthology. National Press Photographers Association, Durham, NC, 1997

Best of Photojournalism, 1995. Anthology. National Press Photographers Association, Durham, NC, 1996

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Education
1979 - 1981	Michigan State University, BA, Creative Writing

1982 - 1984	Lansing Community College, Non-degree program in Documentary Photography
	Studied with Nancy Stuart
1994	Santa Fe Photo Workshop, Documentary Photography
	Studied with David Alan Haravey

Favorite Photography Books

Unguided Tour, Sylvia Plachy

Freidlander, Lee Freidlander

Travelog, Charles Harbutt

The New West, Robert Adams

Uncommon Places, Stephen Shore

Thomas Michael Alleman Statement

Artist Statement
THE GILDED GIANT

I began making “urban landscapes” in Los Angeles in September of 2001, using a $17 toy camera, the medium-format Holga. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, my heart was shattered and my career was momentarily ruined: the weekly newsmagazines I made pictures for had no interest, during that long Fall, in Southern California and our cohort of surfers, politicians, scientists and CEOS. The essential images were at Ground Zero, or in Afghanistan, where a furious new war was afoot. In that upside-down time, I truly had nothing better to do than walk all day in LA’s many strange neighborhoods, shooting my adopted hometown with a camera that truly couldn’t see straight.

Six months later, I took my bag of Holgas to New York to photograph the light-sculpture at Ground Zero, where the fallen towers had been re-imagined by huge banks of movie-premiere spotlights, shining skyward in two brilliant columns. I spent the long evening of my forty-fourth birthday in the neighbor- hoods of Lower Manhattan, dragging tripod and cameras in slow circles around those luminous ghost-buildings.

During almost twenty trips in the eight years since that freezing spring evening, I’ve shot more than a thousand rolls of film in New York and it’s boroughs. Walking all day in Manhattan’s great brick canyons, I’ve learned that the staple heroic views of soaring architecture are all present (and very seductive), but also that there are fresher, more colloquial pictures to be made. Surprising details (great and small, poignant and ironic) leap into focus when one’s gaze resorts to the human scale---and there’s no camera whose gaze is more hilariously human-scale than that infernal Holga.

By obliterating the hyper-detailed, documentary specificity of the reigning multi-coated lens, the Holga’s bizarre optics have given me access to a realm of richly-textured impression and allusion that I couldn’t achieve in my earlier attempts at a lyrical cityscape, which seem psychologically barren in comparison.

Many of these New York pictures are populated by artifacts of American ambition in the nineteenth century, and the great landmarks of 20th century achievement: the buildings, statues and bridges that were all the first of their kind, and which spoke, in their day, of ingenuity, resource and will to an awestruck world.

Photographing this project, I’ve watched contemporary New Yorkers struggle to navigate the long shadows of that golden era: every day these modern folk---with their own ambitions for control of this physical space---must confront the towering indifference of that grand old city, which is truly set in stone. They bang their machines against those edifices, to reshape them, and bore into them like termites, stringing fiber optic cable and broadband, while the city merely twitches and sighs, and watches this age-old business with a single cold eye, alert but unimpressed.

Process Statement
THE GILDED GIANT

Since one has no realistic control of film exposed in the Holga, my only recourse has been to use a variety of film speeds in as many different bodies, and to craft my negatives in the processing, not the shooting. So, I frequently carry three cameras as I wander about Los Angeles: one with TMAX 400 processed normally (for working in broad daylight), one with that same film pushed a half or a full stop (for open shade), and a third camera with Ilford Delta 3200 in it.

At almost every turn, “control” becomes a dubious philosophical construct for Holga users. Only after much deliberate practice can one learn to make reasonable guesses about what the lens of a particular camera is seeing (because every Holga differs, and none are true to their viewfinders). Inevitably, one begins to doubt the wisdom of seeking to control such a capricious piece of junk in the first place.

Anyway, I do try, because “predictable results” remain for me an ethical virtue in the technical realm---though, I have learned to claim grudging ownership of the lucky, beautiful accidents that the Holga bestows occasionally upon a random piece of film.

Thomas Michael Alleman Books
Available from photo-eye

Featured in:

This Side of Paradise. Jennifer Watts & Claudia Bohn-Spector. Merrill, London, England, 2008 (photo-eye Cat# MR035)