Excerpt from An Analog Tether for The Los Angeles Review of Books
Text by Jennifer Piejko
In October of last year, Los Angeles photographer Peter Tomka exhibited two bodies of work where the process of image-making was inseparable from sociality and intimacy. For his presentation Motion Pictures in the most recent edition of Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum’s biennial, he turned his apartment in the Gaylord Apartments in Koreatown (the same building in which Geagan runs the gallery Gaylord Fine Arts) into a kind of large living camera. He blacked out the windows and projected video he’d shot of friends and familiar settings, which he then exposed onto large sheets of silver gelatin paper, in turn developed in the bathtub.
At the gallery Bel Ami in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, Tomka mounted Exposition, covering the walls, floors, and doorways with black tarp and laying down a row of Tom of Finland–branded “watersports sheets” (shallow vinyl inflatable pools) and plastic bins for darkroom chemicals. Transforming the gallery into a darkroom and portrait studio, Tomka, over the exhibition’s run, filled the space with images of the visitors/sitters who stopped in, folding the project back onto itself, using the site of the display as the site of production. It became a social space, one where friends and strangers came by, whether to learn about photography or get in front of the camera. “I was running around, pouring people drinks, introducing people around the room,” he tells me, “in the theater of my darkroom, with different cameras and lenses, explaining the chemical process of silver gelatin printing, which we see as something of an alchemistic process, but it’s not, really—we’ve just gotten so distanced from the physical world.” The roles of both artist and subject were performed, not simply documented. “The prints in Exposition became an index of who came to the show and gave a locality to the photographs that were centered at Bel Ami,” he says. “It was a constant triangulation of getting people together, introducing them to one another, and photographing them as much as the project triangulated between process, my personal life, and philosophical entity. Things reveal themselves in the photographs. Exposition became a social diagram.”
Walking into that room implicitly gave permission to let Tomka have his way with your image. The artist’s sitters trusted him with their depiction and then watched him commit it to paper and put it out on display in a true exposition. He turned their time together in that room into an image and then turned that image into an object with its own sensory system and natural lifespan. The process of letting the image take on a material form, one particularly reactive to touch, is expressed in little slippages—of angle, focus, shadow, and blur. The prints, several feet tall and wide, were pinned to dry on clotheslines strung through the space above the watersports sheets. Artist and sitter were both actors in the experiential theater of shooting a portrait. “I imagine they are watching a film unfold and at the same time they are characters within that film,” Tomka said as an introduction to the project. Walking through the resulting exhibition at the end of the weeks-long open studio provided the same sense of delight and discovery as when you get the photos back from a disposable camera. The slight curling-up of the hanging prints, adjusted focus points, and smears on the test prints are little reminders of the fragility of the image, and that a photograph is not so much documentation as it is something illusory and imprecise, like memory itself.
