TOM FINKE | America: Footprints in Time 1982-2012, 2015

As a photographer, my chief interest is to observe fleeting facial expressions and the constantly changing placements and angles of bodies in space.  Unconscious gestures and calculated poses interest me alike.  All of us are signaling to one another all the time, both deliberately and involuntarily.  My photographs are just another part of the constant ritual of communication in which we all participate.

AMERICA

America is the 4th of July and Labor Day, picnics, parades, and county fairs.  It is skyscrapers and small towns.  It is baseball and jazz, poetry and rodeos, pancakes, hot dogs, and popcorn.  It is summer storms and lightning bugs, crisp autumns, and winter blizzards.  It is every kind of landscape from mountains to deserts, farms to seacoasts, vast plains to wide rivers.  It inspires hopes and nurtures dreams, and it never ceases to amaze. I was born in southwest Ohio, but I have spent time in every state.  Wherever I go, I make photographs of people and places that reflect some part of this big country I call home.  I particularly love making photographs on the street.  I am drawn to the energy, the electricity, and the sheer excitement of being in crowds.  I do not interfere with what I see; I try instead to flow with it.  I use my camera to record what I noticed, but I am also glad to discover in my pictures what I missed seeing when the shutter fired. 

BIO

I was born in Dayton, Ohio and completed my undergraduate degree in science at the University of Dayton. I continued my graduate studies in science at Wright State University and obtained my M.F.A. degree from the University of Cincinnati. I continued my education by attending photographic workshops at The Zone VI Studios in Vermont, the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, Maine, and enrolled in the PhD program at Arizona State University. I have traveled extensively across the United States, Asia, and the South Pacific and I currently live in Denver, Colorado. I began teaching college-level photography in 1979 and currently I teach in Denver, Colorado, concentrating on classes in photography dealing with the aesthetic, technical, historical, and critical analysis of the photographic processes. I consider my work to be social documentary photography, centering on the aspects of who we are and how we present ourselves. I have been working on this current body of work for over 30 years. In addition to this work, I have produced numerous other bodies of work including a series of Hand-Colored Black and White images made primarily in Arizona concentrating on the artificial landscape many find in the desert Southwest that can be viewed on my website at www.tomfinke.com. In 2015, Sokyusha Publishing in Japan, published two books of my work, one consisting of Social Documentary Images made in the America and the other Social Documentary Images made in Japan. Additionally, I have produced two limited edition hand-made books in association with Bloodroot Press in Ann Arbor, MI.  My work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in corporate and private collections.