Peter Tomka, Motion Pictures
Text by David J. Getsy

Peter Tomka’s photographs flirt with a loss of control. He has made things hard on himself, submerging the self- exposure he has built into his drawn-out and indirect material process. The resulting large-scale photographs remind us of what they do not show. Abrupt cropping, excessive grain, errant shadows, and blurred traces of motion compete with any recognizable image. They feel telescoped, as if we are looking at a distance or through a lens straining to capture and hold.

Such effects are a rejection of the assumed equation of photography with immediacy. Especially since the ubiquity of high-resolution digital photography, capturing an image has been quick, computer aided, and endless. We use photographs as the diaries of our lives, seeing them as an endless resource accumulating in our phones’ albums. Tomka remarks, “Memory is so visual now, if you want to remember what you did a month ago, you can go through your pictures and say, ‘A month ago, I was here.’ You can remember where you were.” Tomka has thought about this diary effect and how our lives are structured by the images we have taken—and collected. His work, however, breaks with the instant image and its wasteful accumulation, choosing to materialize a small selection of images as labor-intensive events on photographic paper.

Tomka works where he lives, and the physical confines of his domestic space form the material parameters of the photographs. He transforms his living area into a room-size darkroom. When printing on light-sensitive photographic paper, darkness is essential. In traditional processes, an intense light is shown through a film negative (itself a result of the exposure of light onto photosensitive celluloid inside the camera) onto paper that has been chemically treated to react to that light. A further chemical process “fixes” the paper to stop its light sensitivity, and a photographic print is created. This traditional “wet process” requires precision and control to master the light and chemicals in order to create the proper contrasts and depths. The darkroom is of equal importance to the act of taking the photograph; it is where the immaterial image becomes materialized. Tomka exaggerates this process to make large-scale prints with photosensitive paper attached to one of his walls. To block the light, he will upend his bed, with the only rays passing through a hole of about three inches in diameter that he’s bored through the mattress. He has wryly compared the aperture to a glory hole—not inapposite given the source of his makeshift studio’s “safe light,” the specialized bulbs that photographers use to see in the darkroom without affecting the photosensitive paper. He explains:

I live in a bachelor suite—technically that’s just a room without a kitchen. I black out my windows. I set up the bed. I put the projector in the bed. I project onto the easel, which is where I put the paper, and there’s kind of like a coat-rack mechanism where I’m opening the shutter to let in the light and then clos- ing the shutter to stop the exposure. The safe light was a light bulb I had stolen from the bathroom in the Cock [a gay bar in New York]. (I was there one night, and I unscrewed it—and burned my hand.) I was using that as my safe light, but then I realized that it wasn’t actually red light, it was just a painted light bulb.

Because of this disruptive domestic set-up, all of Tomka’s prints are hard-won and unique. He has loosened control on the process through these ad hoc adaptions, fighting the light and its leaks. To expose the print and to fix it, he has to transform his bachelor suite entirely. The mattress is his mattress, and it will later be returned to a horizontal position to make his bed. As he concluded about this ritual, “I had driven myself to an edge in that printing process, but I think that was important.”

The images Tomka chooses to project in this homemade darkroom come from many sources. They are digital images that have accumulated on his phone, selected from thousands of photographs of his life, his friends, and also images he has encountered in his research. Many of his photographic series are the result of his tracking a theme through the image library, selecting and altering images both impersonal and personal. We are flooded with found images and captured photographs, and Tomka draws from the recurring patterns he discerns and tracks. Photographs of and by others are interspersed with images of Tomka (by himself and others) throughout his series, leaving it often unclear if an image has been appropriated or crafted.

His most recent work has added another layer of difficulty, in which he will now be using slowly moving projections (rather than still images) to expose the photosensitive paper. This will increase both the blur and the technical complications. For these works, he has been inspired by videos of himself dancing at parties—moments of both spectacle and self-consciousness. He offers:

There was always a point with the camera where you’re trying to evade the idea that a camera is in front of you or something. I think that’s a limit of ecstasy that you can push up against. Am I accessing self-consciousness right now, or am I accessing liberation or something? I think maybe that is me trying to mix all of that into these….The printed photographs will be still, but I want to have that movement, and I want to show that isolation and maybe that sincerity and that joy and somehow have it look like puzzle pieces that fit together.

Tomka’s conceptually and materially complex practice aligns itself with the amateur archivist and the home inventor. From the sea of collected and captured photographs, he finds the connections and patterns that congeal and won’t let go. His domestically disruptive and self-made printing process is a further way of slowing the image and drawing out its strangeness and allure. Fighting the light to see the image made material, Tomka’s work might be understood as a metaphor for the vertiginous ways that some images attach to us