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.

Roma was a founder of the Department of Photography at Columbia University's School of the Arts and was head of the Department. He retired from his professorship there in 2018, shortly after the publication of a New York Times article about allegations of misconduct made by some of his former students. 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.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023