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.

Package details: 

Introduction: Giancarlo T. Roma

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: powerHouse Books, 2016

Details:  144 pages, 100 images

Size: 10¾” x 8¼”

The second collaboration between father and son Thomas Roma and Giancarlo T. Roma, The Waters of Our Time is a book that could only be done in the latter part of this renowned photographer's career and with the unique contemplation of his watchful son. A retrospective of sorts, the book contains 142 of Roma's photographs spanning most of his career, beginning on the cover with a picture taken from his first roll of film shot in 1972, and a fictional text by Giancarlo T. Roma, written as a first-person narrative recollection in the voice of an older woman who has spent her life in Brooklyn. The written story begins on the book's cover and is interwoven with the photographs, lending a reflective quality to the interplay between them.

In this way, the project is a true collaboration, resembling the making of a movie in reverse, where the pictures function as the script and the text acts as the moving images, coming in response. The title comes from the song "Follow" (written by Jerry Merrick and famously sung by Richie Havens, also a Brooklyn native), whose lyrics are reproduced throughout the book, and serves as kind of a sound track to the story, adding to the cinematic quality.

The Waters of Our Time was conceived as an homage to Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes' book The Sweet Flypaper of Life published in 1955, a cherished part of the elder Roma's library. The book remains true to Flypaper in terms of design (size, layout, font), but differs greatly in process. Whereas Hughes selected and sequenced DeCarava's photographs before writing the text for Flypaper, Roma selected and sequenced his own photographs first, leaving Giancarlo to write the text in the white space between pictures for The Waters.

Signed: Thomas Roma and Giancarlo T. Roma

Published: powerHouse Books, 2014

Details: 100 pages, 142 photographs

Size: 5" x 7¼"

Mechanical horses and departing soldiers are the two bodies of work that make up Dear Knights and Dark Horses, the latest powerHouse release by renowned fine art and documentary photographer Thomas Roma. There is a haunting elegance present in each series taken separately—in the peeling paint of the inactive rides, in the forlorn faces of men on the verge of the unknown—but taken together, the sense of unease present in the images resonates twice as clearly. 

The portraits of soldiers were made in the early morning hours of January 2004, in the Jamaica, New York Armory as they were being deployed to the Iraq Theater of Operations. They are Army National Guardsmen of the 1st Battalion, 258th Field Artillery Regiment of the 42nd Infantry “Rainbow” Division. These are guardsmen, not army recruits. They have been called into service from lives spent not training for combat, but spent working everyday jobs and raising families. Roma portrays these men in a straightforward manner capturing their bravado as well as their apprehension in their final hours before beginning an unexpected voyage from which they might not return.

Coin-operated pony rides began appearing in front of “five and dimes” and candy stores across the U.S. in the late 1940s and quickly became part of the retail landscape. Sitting unattended collecting coins, they offered children a chance to imagine they were riding Gene Autry’s Champion, the Lone Ranger’s Silver, or Roy Roger’s Trigger. The machines pictured here are long past their prime; riderless, their novelty long since faded. Roma manages to humanize these machines by finding their potential to represent loss, abandonment, and the obsolete—themes that have been intertwined with America’s returning soldiers since Vietnam.

Introduction: Alec Wilkinson, also includes a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: powerHouse Books, 2010

Details:  96 page, 32 images

Size: 6¾”x 7¾”

Like so many of the best photographers, Thomas Roma has a flair for thinking in book form. His first book, the limited-edition and handbound volume Brooklyn Gardens (1980), affirmed this flair from the outset of his career, and over the past 30 years Roma has published 13 volumes, always composing and sequencing his classical and modernist vision of contemporary life with care and thought. Roma’s concern for bookmaking accords with his general autodidacticism: he is self-taught to the degree that he even designs and builds his own cameras and lighting equipment. Pictures for Books is the first retrospective volume on Roma. It gathers selections from four previous publications: Found in Brooklyn (1996), Come Sunday (1996), Sicilian Passage (2003) and On Three Pillars: Torah, Worship and the Practice of Loving Kindness, The Synagogues of Brooklyn (2007). Shot in black and white, the sequences included here display two signature Roma traits: a quietly steady and penetrative observation of the close-at-hand, and a fondness for the diverse neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the borough in which Roma was born and continues to reside. Pictures for Books is full of images that capture daily life (both in Brooklyn and abroad) as it opens out into moments of capacious quietude.

Introduction: Susan Kismaric

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: 2010

Details: 136 pages, 

Size: 8½” x 10" 

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.

“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

Text: Dr. Robert Coles

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: powerHouse Books, 2008

Details: 112 pages, 64 images

Size: 6" x 8¼”

On Three Pillars: Torah, Worship, and Practice of Loving Kindness, The Synagogues of Brooklyn is not meant to be a complete visual inventory of Brooklyn synagogues, past or present, but an evocation of that history into the present day. 

Roughly half the photographs in this book are of synagogues functioning today, the balance of buildings that were once synagogues but have since been adapted to other uses (like churches, community centers, government offices). The photographs are divided into five sections, each containing a picture of an empty lot where a synagogue once stood. In these haunting shots, at first we are tempted to wonder which building pictured was once a synagogue, but then we spy the barren ground of the empty lot and understand: none of them. 

The work is personal and unavoidably elegiac. Thomas Roma, who with his wife Anna extensively researched Brooklyn synagogues, looking through old real estates records and telephone books, could have easily filled the book with images of presently functioning Jewish houses of prayer, but chose instead to give equal emphasis to buildings deserted by their congregations. 

When a congregation quits its house of prayer, do the walls retain a trace of the sacred? If the building is razed do the charred concrete foundations, the weeds, continue to hold a memory of God’s name? Roma leaves the choice up to us.

Introduction: Philip Lopate

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: powerHouse Books, 2007

Details: 120 pages, 111 images

Size: 12¼" x 14¾”

In 1999, photographer Thomas Roma found himself within the walls of Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison, one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, doing a special photographic project for Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory. During downtime Roma wandered through this nineteenth-century fortress, walking in and out of many of its seven hundred or so cells. After Holmesburg’s inception in 1896—on the occasion of which one Philadelphia reporter warned, “Abandon all hope all ye who enter here”—it quickly became the prison for Philadelphia’s worst criminals, eventually packing up to five prisoners into six by eight foot cells designed for single-occupancy. After leaving the site, Roma found his mind often inhabiting the space of the prison with its halls of flaking paint and graffiti-covered cells. Overwhelmed by the evidence of the lives spent inside those small rooms, Roma returned to photograph on his own, creating the images now collected for In Prison Air: The Cells of Holmesburg Prison. 

Holmesburg, closed in 1997, is perhaps most well known for a series of scientific experiments carried out on its prisoners over a period of twenty-five years. Sponsored by the U.S. Army, the CIA, the University of Pennsylvania, The Dow Chemical Company, and Johnson & Johnson, the experiments tested the effects of substances ranging from deodorants and hair dyes to LSD and BZ, a compound ten times as strong as LSD, to radioactive isotopes and chemical warfare agents. These tests also included a special climate chamber designed for the study of skin diseases encountered during World War II. Dr. Albert Kligman, the architect of the human testing program at Holmesburg, saw the prison as “acres of skin.…like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.” Now, Kligman’s tests are considered by many to be one of the most explicit violations of the Nuremberg Code, as undereducated and illiterate prisoners almost certainly did not realize the consequences of their consent. The cells are now empty of the men that endured their squalor, but their presence remains through the detritus and graffiti accumulated over the prison’s century-long history, etched indelibly into Roma’s master lens.

Introduction: John Szarkowksi

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: powerHouse Books, 2005

Details: 96 pages, 44 images

Size: 12¼” x 13"

Sicily: a land of mystery and myth. Inspired by stories told by his mother’s family, famed documentary photographer Thomas Roma left his native Brooklyn for Sicily in search of his roots in 1977. Photographing abroad on a Guggenheim Fellowship, Roma spent months at a time over the next fourteen years traversing the island, challenging himself to connect with a culture and a lifestyle completely foreign to his experience as a New York City street photographer. 

In Sicilian Passage, Roma taps into the timeless essence of Europe’s agrarian past. His photographs of the familial homeland are untainted by stereotypical notions of Sicilian culture. Instead of old ladies in black veils gossiping on the stoop, Roma’s images are lyrical odes to the country pastoral. Through his lens, we are transported to another land where nature and the climate have tamed its inhabitants into a slower rhythm: gnarly ancient trees grow haphazardly in the crop fields; marble ruins erupt from the hillsides; shirtless young shepherds tend to their flocks under a ruthless Mediterranean sun. Sicilian Passage is an ode to the mysteries of the timeless in “The Island in the Sea of Light.” 

“Tom told me that as a child he used to try to dream of Sicily as he drifted off to sleep. Lying in bed, he’d picture mountains that were higher than the Berkshires he had seen in upstate New York, and a sea that was bluer than it was at the beach at Coney Island. He’d imagine a place where the sun was brighter and where figs grew bigger and sweeter than they did in his grandparent’s backyard in Brooklyn. Sicilian Passage is an attempt to reimagine that dream.”
—Anna Roma

Introduction: Sandra Philips

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: powerHouse Books, 2003

Details: 84 pages, 52 images

Size: 9½” x 7¾”

"Sanctuary refers to a place of worship and a state of mind―but it also refers to the most sacred part of a Christian church, the site where the altar is housed. Thomas Roma's photographs locate these most sacred parts of the community within the larger context of Brooklyn's landscape, charting the triumphant efforts of generations to leave their mark, to make their way through the world of mammon and man, seeking solace within the city but far beyond it. They also reveal a persistent, irresistible determination to express spirituality within the often harsh landscape of the city, giving glory to God's resplendent being even through the often makeshift architecture of the storefront and the movie theater."―Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

In Sanctuary, acclaimed photographer Thomas Roma offers a compelling sequence of 52 black-and-white images that document the varieties of religious experience in Brooklyn as seen in the borough's sacred architecture. Juxtaposing pictures of grand Gothic and Romanesque churches photographed at a distance from backyards and alleys with more intimate views of smaller places of worship housed in converted storefronts and dilapidated brownstones, Roma subtly calls attention to issues of history and class, revealing how successive waves of immigrants have shaped Brooklyn's urbanscape and how the African-American and Hispanic communities living there now have worked to make these neighborhoods, culturally and spiritually, their own.

"From shabby storefronts to soaring cathedrals, from Iglesia Pentecostal Apocalipsis to St. Joseph's Roman Catholic, this photo book documents the churches of Brooklyn. In gentle black-and-white, against the trash and light of the city, Roma's pictures capture all the ways immigrants and citizens, rich and poor, have made homes for God in the harsh urban landscape."―Molly Marsh, Sojourners Magazine

Introduction: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002

Details:  96 pages, 52 images

Size: 9¾” x 10¼”

“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 & 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 & 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

Text: Giancarlo T. Roma

Signed: Thomas Roma and Giancarlo T. Roma

Published: powerHouse Books, 2002

Details: 80 pages, 36 images

Size:  7¼" x 9¼”

Camping out in the Brooklyn Criminal Court building from December 1997 to early 1999, Roma, photographer and director of photography for Columbia University, talked to victims, defendants, trial witnesses and their families, and sometimes took their portraits then and there. The result is this collection of 83 duotones that give human faces to the application of the law.

Foreword: Norman Mailer

Introduction: Dr. Robert Coles

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: powerHouse Books, 2001

Details: 184 pages, 82 images

Size: 9" x 11" 

Roma takes his photographs to understand how we shape and are shaped by the rituals of daily life. In Higher Ground, Roma portrays the trains’ ambience as well as the rotating cast of characters who ride them. In these candid portraits, the riders in Roma’s photographs seem to be suspended in time, caught in private moments in the most public of places. Whether dreamers or purposeful voyagers, the people in Roma’s Higher Ground remind us that we are all moving in the same direction, the train representing the forward motion of time.

Introduction: Ian Frazier

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: International Center for Photography/DAP

Details: 96 Pages, 114 images

Size: 8" x 11"

Few contemporary photographers are as closely identified with one place as Thomas Roma is with Brooklyn, New York. Begun in 1991 and made over the course of several summers, this selection of 41 duotone photographs from Roma's Sunset Park series expresses in sensual images the lassitude of hot afternoons at a huge community swimming pool.

Afterward: Richard B. Woodward

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: Smithsonian Press

Details: 64 pages, 40 images

Size: 8" x 9" 

In 1990, Thomas Roma began photographing the exterior of houses of worship in his native Brooklyn, which features more churches per square mile than any other place in the United States. One morning, the pastor of an African-American Christian church housed in a former Jewish temple invited Roma to join the congregation with his camera, explaining that God's work was not in the buildings, but in what went on inside. Roma eventually photographed more than 150 services in 52 African-American churches, richly fulfilling his desire "to make religious pictures for modern times." 

Introduction: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: Museum of Modern Art, NY/Abrams

Details: 112 pages, 87 images

Size: 9¾” x 10¼” 

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 neighborhoods that shaped him, showing aspects of the city which are by turns amusing, forlorn, and surreal.

Introduction: Dr. Robert Coles

Signed: Thomas Roma

Published: WW Norton & Co.

Details: 94 pages, 45 images

Size: 10" x 12" 

A hand made book. 

A hand made book.