Tag: Thomas Alleman

I never get tired of looking at Thomas Alleman’s remarkable photographs. His curiosity takes him into worlds personal, familiar, and unknown, and no matter the destination, he finds gold where ever he points his lens. His powerful project about his mother, The Unwinding garnered him a Top 50 nod in Critical Mass some years back. At the core of his abilities are two things–he is a humanist and has a history of getting the story, with a legacy of traversing streets and landscapes with laser sharp curiosity.  Today we feature his project, Social Studies, an 18-year quest to find his photographic voice at the beginning of his stellar career.

Los Angeles photographer Thomas Alleman has a legacy of looking at Los Angeles with the unique perspective of a visual hunter. As he traverses the city on foot or by car, his projects reflect the visual connections to it’s history of Noir and movie making, but he also investigates the ubiquitous visual assaults of advertising, architecture, and the land itself. His new series, Living On The Land In Los Angeles, FLORA, explores the idea that we live in a false environment with landscape that is non-native, filled with species that are invasive and damaging resulting in a terrain that has a mind of it’s own. His compositions and use of flash present an off-kilter, mess of a marriage of flora, architecture, and humanity.

Alleman began working on a personal project titled “Social Studies” in the mid-1980s that embodied his goal as a photographer: “to stand aside from the assigned narrative of whatever situation I was photographing … and deconstruct it; my favorite pictures demonstrated a multitude of ‘facts’ within a fog of obfuscations; the scene didn’t add up, the context had been hijacked and re-formatted,” he said.

Dancing in the Dragons Jaws is Los Angeles-based photographer Thomas Alleman’s profound and nuanced body of work taken of San Francisco’s broader gay community during the mid-1980s. Working as a newspaper photographer for The Sentinel at the time, he was given the time and liberty that all sociopolitical relevant issues—including those of the present day—deserve