Thomas Alleman

Sunshine & Noir

October 1, 2009 - November 1, 2009

Thomas Michael Alleman began making urban landscapes in Los Angeles in the Fall of 2001, using a medium format Holga toy camera. Sunshine & Noir is a series of photographs is Alleman’s response to the hackneyed visual mythos of LA, presenting a cast-eyed and meandering tone-poem about public space in the last Great American City.  Alleman writes, “The Holga’s many laughable failures are well known and all-encompassing: focus, exposure and parallax are effectively uncontrollable, and the plastic lens is always aberrant, cloudy and vignetted, and those bizarre optics have given me access to a realm of richly-textured suggestion, impression and allusion that I couldn’t achieve in my earlier attempts at the lyrical landscape.”