Thomas Roma

Thomas Roma is an American photographer who has worked almost exclusively since 1974 exploring the neighborhoods and institutions of his native Brooklyn, photographing scenes from churches, subways and everyday life. His work, made almost exclusively using a homemade camera, has received widespread acclaim.

Roma's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Life and work
Roma was a founder of the Department of Photography at Columbia University's School of the Arts and was head of the Department until his retirement in 2018. Roma has also taught photography at Yale, Fordham, and Cooper Union.

He has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and his work has appeared in one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and the International Center of Photography in New York City.

For his collections of black-and-white photographs Come Sunday, exhibited at MOMA in 1996, Roma attended more than 150 religious services at 52 black churches in Brooklyn over a period of three years. Come Sunday is one of Roma's best-known works, along with a collection of photographs at people in the Brooklyn courthouses.

In the Vale of Cashmere (2015) contains landscape and portrait photographs at a gay cruising ground in Brooklyn, New York, made over more than 3 years.

Siciliano Camera Works
In 1972, inspired by a Voigtländer Bergheil camera used by Brassaï, Roma created a prototype medium format 6 cm × 9 cm (2.4 in × 3.5 in) camera, which he used for most of his career. After pictures taken with it won a 1973 New York State Council for the Arts grant, he began selling his cameras under the name "Siciliano Camera Works". Siciliano also manufactured a 35mm hand-held panoramic camera.

Reported allegations of sexual misconduct
On January 3, 2018, The New York Times published an article about allegations made by five former students from Columbia University and School of Visual Arts, in which they accused Roma of sexual misconduct.

Through an attorney, Roma issued a statement about the accusations: "The statements they [the five women] are making about his asserted misconduct are replete with inaccuracies and falsehoods. All four [five] have taken isolated, innocent incidents, none of them predatory, and have created fictitious versions of reality that are libelous and in the present political climate designed to damage his career and his personal life. Professor Roma's sympathies then and now lie with those who have been mistreated in any way and he completely fails to understand why these women have chosen to create these complaints two decades after the alleged facts supposedly occurred."

Roma retired from teaching from Columbia University on January 3, 2018, the day New York Times story broke.

The National Gallery of Art cancelled an exhibition of Roma's work, scheduled to open May 2018, because of the accusations.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024