Found in Brooklyn

Across the East River from Manhattan lies Brooklyn - not just a city within a city but a world of its own. Thomas Roma's photographs pay homage to the diverse, expansive, and truly unique place that is Brooklyn. For Roma, Brooklyn is the world of his boyhood and growing up, a place of lush gardens and expanses of white cement, of the merging of old country and new world. In these photographs, made over a period of twenty years, Roma finds images of the neighborhoods that shaped him.

As Robert Coles tells us in his introduction, Roma is "a poet of the camera, a localist poet...intent on helping us see a given world." Alert and knowing, Roma looks directly into the mundane and creates poetry, mystery, surprise. An old man sits in his undershirt surrounded by the flowering beauty he has created. A boy lies on a highway overpass, dreaming, while cars rush below. Roma's pictures take us through streets and passages, abandoned lots and backyards.

These images let us see Brooklyn in ways that are by turn amusing, forlorn, stunning, and surreal, but always true to the photographer's experience.