Goddess, Heroine, Beast: Anna Hyatt Huntington's New York Sculpture, 1902-1936 Goddess, Heroine, Beast: Anna Hyatt Huntington's New York Sculpture, 1902-1936 Multiple Occupancy Common Love, Aesthetics of Becoming Social Forces Visualized: Photography and Scientific Charity, 1900-1920 Edward Koren: The Capricious Line Pictures for Books: Photographs by Thomas Roma Modernism and Iraq The New Acropolis Museum Treasures Rediscovered: Chinese Stone Sculpture from the Sackler Collections at Columbia University Revolutions: A Century of Makonde Masquerade in Mozambique Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York Architecture in Print: Design and Debate in the Soviet Union 1919–1935, Selections from the Collection of Stephen Garmey Guide to Phlamoudhi "Please, teach me..." Rainer Ganahl and the Politics of Learning Restoring Byzantium: The Kariye Camii in Istanbul & the Byzantine Institute Restoration The Troubled Search: The Work of Max Abramovitz Moscow: City, Spectacle, Capital of Photography Reflection: Seven Years in Print—The LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies Jean Fautrier, 1898–1964 Paris as Gameboard: Man Ray's Atgets Arte Povera: Selections from the Sonnabend Collection Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban Percival Goodman: Architect, Planner, Teacher, Painter Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts—Events, Objects, Documents Brushed Voices: Calligraphy in Contemporary China Mastering McKim's Plan: Columbia's First Century on Morningside Heights Robert Motherwell on Paper Apostles in England: Sir James Thornhill and the Legacy of Raphael's Tapestry Cartoons The Old World Builds the New: The Guastavino Company and the Technology of the Catalan Vault, 1885–1962 The Post-Pre-Raphaelite Print: Etching, Illustration, Reproductive Engraving, & Photography in England in and around the 1860s Unfaded Pageant: Edwin Austin Abbey's Shakespearean Subjects Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings Victorian Pleasures: American Board and Table Games of the Nineteenth Century from the Liman Collection Impossible Picturesqueness Sexual Difference: Both Sides of the Camera
Pictures for Books: Photographs by Thomas Roma

Pictures for Books
Photographs by Thomas Roma

Susan Kismaric
Wallach Art Gallery, 2010
8 1/2 x 10", 136 pp., 123 illus.
ISBN 978-1-884919-25-1, Paper, $30

Like so many of the best photographers, Thomas Roma has a flair for thinking in book form. His first book, the limited-edition and handbound volume Brooklyn Gardens (1980), affirmed this flair from the outset of his career, and over the past 30 years Roma has published 13 volumes, always composing and sequencing his classical and modernist vision of contemporary life with care and thought. Roma's concern for bookmaking accords with his general autodidacticism: he is self-taught to the degree that he even designs and builds his own cameras and lighting equipment.

Pictures for Books is the first retrospective volume on Roma. It gathers selections from four previous publications: Found in Brooklyn (1996), Come Sunday (1996), Sicilian Passage (2003) and On Three Pillars: Torah, Worship and the Practice of Loving Kindness, The Synagogues of Brooklyn (2007). Shot in black and white, the sequences included here display two signature Roma traits: a quietly steady and penetrative observation of the close-at-hand, and a fondness for the diverse neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the borough in which Roma was born and continues to reside. Pictures for Books is full of images that capture daily life (both in Brooklyn and abroad) as it opens out into moments of capacious quietude.