“Sunshine & Noir” by Thomas Michael Alleman
Thomas Michael Alleman started his career as a photojournalist, then became a magazine freelancer and commercial photographer and most recently has moved his into fine art photography. His most remarkable series is “Sunshine & Noir“, a collection of impressive B&W images of Los Angeles and New York, taken with a Holga, pictures that become a map of lights and shapes of urban landscapes. Taking pictures with a camera that has a plastic lens forces the photographer to focus on the most fundamental aspect of photography, mapping the light, eliminates the distraction of details and presents the visual experience of the whole composition with unusual drama. I hope one day ”Sunshine & Noir” becomes a photobook as it is an excellent body of work that I would love to have in my collection. You can also see the images at the Robin Rice Gallery site.
I began using toy cameras to make “urban landscapes” in September of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. My heart was shattered, then, and my career was momentarily ruined. In that upside-down time, I truly had nothing better to do than walk all day, every day, in Los Angeles’ many strange neighborhoods, shooting with a camera that couldn’t see straight.
Six months later, I took my bag of Holgas to New York, to photograph the light-sculpture at Ground Zero that re-imagined the fallen towers with huge banks of movie-premiere spotlights shining heavenward in two brilliant columns. I spent five hours, one chilly spring evening, zig-zagging through most of the neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan to slowly approach the ghostly buildings. It was my forty-fourth birthday. [more here].
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