Enduring Justice: Photographs by Thomas Roma - Hardcover

Thomas Roma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1576871029 ISBN 13: 9781576871027

Publisher: powerHouse Books, 2001

Synopsis

Camping out in the Brooklyn Criminal Court building from December 1997 to early 1999, Roma, photographer and director of photography for Columbia University, talked to victims, defendants, trial witnesses and their families, and sometimes took their portraits then and there. The result is this collection of 83 duotones that give human faces to the application of the law.

About this title

About the Author:

As Norman Mailer writes in a short foreword, "justice comes to long dead hours sitting around," as the beleaguered visages and tired bodies here readily attest. As Robert Coles, Harvard social ethicist and presidential Medal of Freedom winner, puts it in an introduction, these photos show "the struggle of various Americans to find themselves, to get a grip on their emotional moorings, to steer clear of all sorts of perplexing and scary legal imperatives as they descend upon one's eyes, ears, thoughts, anticipations, expectations, amidst a series of events that have their own momentum, logic, prompt their own requirements, madness, obligations." That sentence's complexities perfectly reflect those of the photographs.

Thomas Roma, two-time recipient of Guggenheim Fellowships, has exhibited internationally, had one-man shows at The Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal. The Director of Photography at Columbia University, author of Come Sunday, Found in Brooklyn, Sunset Park, and Higher Ground, and founding contributing photographer to DoubleTake, Roma lives in Brooklyn with his wife Anna and son Giancarlo.

From Publishers Weekly:

Camping out in the Brooklyn Criminal Court building from December 1997 to early 1999, Roma (Come Sunday), photographer and director of photography for Columbia University, talked to victims, defendants, trial witnesses and their families, and sometimes took their portraits then and there. The result is this collection of 83 duotones that give human faces to the application of the law. As Norman Mailer writes in a short foreword, "justice comes to long dead hours sitting around," as the beleaguered visages and tired bodies here readily attest. As Robert Coles, Harvard social ethicist and presidential Medal of Freedom winner, puts it in an introduction, these photos show "the struggle of various Americans to find themselves, to get a grip on their emotional moorings, to steer clear of all sorts of perplexing and scary legal imperatives as they descend upon one's eyes, ears, thoughts, anticipations, expectations, amidst a series of events that have their own momentum, logic, prompt their own requirements, madness, obligations." That sentence's complexities perfectly reflect those of the photographs.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: powerHouse Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1576871029
• ISBN 13: 9781576871027
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184