Art · Voices on the Work
Voices.
Texts and speeches that curators have written and given for my exhibitions. They look at the series Hidden Places from different perspectives. In their own words.
Voices translated from the German.
Typologies of an Everyday Insight
Alexander LeinemannArt historian · Research associate at the Sprengel Museum Hannover
Self-Referential Affirmation
One of photography's greatest achievements is its speed. Refined over the centuries and brought to the highest precision, the photographic snapshot belongs today to the basic vocabulary of the medium. If that term describes the swift drawing of the ever-present camera, the act of creation that governs it carries an inherent attitude of subliminal vehemence. In the moment of its execution, this conduct is inevitably, and usually loudly, condensed into the familiar declaration: "I alone have seen it!"
The photograph guided by the manner of the snapshot, however missionary its role was understood to be in conveying processes unfolding in reality, has always carried a self-centered tendency toward the exclusive need to communicate. It is hardly surprising, then, that in everyday image-making the snapshot, recording, documenting, striving for clarity and yet satisfying the urge for an inner human affirmation, became one of photography's most essential means of expression.
The Art of Keeping an Overview
The rapidly taken picture must therefore be granted a fundamental form of contradiction. And yet the moment, thought of as present and in truth always already past, has been declared the focus of highest urgency to be captured in the photographic image. But as sequences of movement became visible, as the previously inaccessible could be visualized, and as every event charged with sudden relevance was permeated by a collective litany that preferred the photographic moment to the encounter with reality itself, a deceptive cycle arose, wearing itself out on the medium, whose influence reaches into the present. Faithful to the thinking internalized in collective snapping, that the very next photograph will somehow lead to a comprehensive clarity, an unmanageable flood of images, conditioned by little selective viewing, has become the inevitable result. Caught in a repetition perpetually concerned with authenticity, the photograph entrusted with the moment thus became the bearer of a hoped-for yet never returning presumption of presence. In the belief in a supposedly existing possibility of making the past return through precision of detail, speed and an endlessly repeatable sequence, this hopeful desire led to a reflection that readily granted the photograph the capacity to present a likeness of insights located in reality.
A photograph, however, will never fully depict reality, nor translate the inescapably intangible quality of a moment into a form immanent to the image. Only an intervention on the artistic level, far more comprehensive and situated beyond the familiar registers, is capable of initiating moments of photographic urgency that shift the momentary onto an unexpectedly present plane and let it become moments of present significance.
When Moments Become Present Certainty
The German artist Roman Thomas uses photography in the most varied ways.
His large-format works challenge the viewer and at times dissolve the viewer's prevailing routine of looking. Out of a rigidity established by perception, and an accessibility always hoped for on a mono-perspectival plane, the images create a shift toward a confrontation that at times demands critical note. Roman Thomas's images repeatedly contain individuals sought out, found and photographically recorded. They are located where man has left his architectural traces, frequented by the society that followed. At these places, some familiar and already noted in images, the artist intervenes with his photography by displacing that which makes imaginary location and internalization possible. What man was able to create on limited ground to enclose, exclude and encircle a coexistence that functions toward and yet apart from one another becomes, in the large-format photographs, the agent of a comprehensive and yet silent mediation. Works such as "Whitby Street" (2017), "Two Towers" (2017) or "Steps to Heaven" (2017) do at first depict all too familiar places in visually accessible form. Yet the initial appearance of the familiar deceives, for all these photographs carry a rift between imagination and reality that instantly torpedoes any hoped-for recognition. The large-format works of the German artist present pictorial situations, different and yet to be called similar to one another, which confront each viewer with the insight that the photographically created pictorial space does refer to what exists in reality. What photographs such as "Whitby Street" (2017) offer, however, is the recognition, become image, that the photographically oriented gaze and the artist's persistence have led to an art object whose pictorial quality constitutes a singular materialization standing entirely on its own. Out of reality, a continuing actuality within the image has been created, one capable of showing that the urgency of the large-format photographs operates not solely in the aspect of recognition located outside, but in the inner-specific realization of having opened a place to view that could be intuitively conceived, perceived and carried over into the photograph.
Christiane Hoffmann M.A.Museum director and art historian
Photography as an art form owes its great significance as an independent position in the art world to, among others, the Düsseldorf school, the photographer couple Bernd and Hilla Becher and the student generation of Gursky, Ruff, Struth and Höfer. Seemingly far from fashion photography, urban life and the places of the real world belong to photography's themes.
Roman Thomas, the son of a photographer, has had an intense relationship with photography from an early age. After an apprenticeship as a carpenter and further study at the FOS Gestaltung, his path led professionally into photography.
Today, working as a photographer for renowned industrial companies in the field of furniture design and for architects worldwide, Thomas has seen many places of the world and taken them in with the eye of the artist and photographer.
Taken in, in a double sense: absorbed with all his senses and captured with his camera. He engages with the places he visits, takes in architecture, people and colors, and arrives with all these elements at his own way of seeing and at his ideas. He knows exactly what he wants to show. Which elements of light and line are to play a role in the finished picture. How feeling, optical impression and the chosen theme are to find their way in.
It may be that a single exposure already shows the desired elements in interplay. But it may also be that many pictures of one point of view have to be made, which are then fused into a constructed, new image. Digital montage allows, for one motif, the changing play of light and people who appear in only a single frame in the course of the session to be woven into the composition.
The event becomes a simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, without the viewer being able to notice it.
Roman Thomas thus directs his works. He describes the design and composition of his works as the "creation of dream images" rather than "images of reality from a single shot". By this he means that his individual idea, his experience of seeing and his subjective feeling form the final authority for his work.
The famous photographic reality as a depiction of the world is undercut here, despite all closeness to the motif and the possibility of re-experiencing it on site. In Thomas's works, architectures in the midst of metropolises become flat, relief-like stage sets. Their staggering is layered invisibly. The achieved pictorial effect, heightened further by the large-format development, can be described as a pull that draws the viewer in.
Deserted places, as in the work "Steps to heaven", are inconceivable without the Christian iconography of the ladder to heaven. In Thomas's picture the people are missing; only placeholders of their existence, like the parked bicycles, are visible.
The motif of ascent is nevertheless understandable to every human being. The picture is like an invitation to dare the climb, since a zebra crossing facing the viewer can be recognized as an entry into the image.
Here a public, architecturally shaped spatial structure is the invitation to the viewer to accept a personal cipher for success in life and life's stages. The direction of longing in this work is upward. One wants to reach the hidden light (mounted in the mirrored facade, running counter to the reflections of the sky). Even if, seen from below, the upper level ends darkly and massively in arch forms that cannot be deciphered. Still there is light and presumably brightness, even if it perhaps consists only of electric light sources.
The readability of Thomas's works is always given, and the photo artist does not confuse the viewer's senses entirely.
Deserted spaces within large architectures are, by human evolution, always threatening or unpleasant for people. But when the pictorial direction falls, as in "Old House", through high-rise canyons onto an old brick building from the past, the harshness and the felt unease are softened. The manageable structure with its small dimensions is more pleasant and homely than the giants around it. Only the forbidding dark window cavities break this homeliness too. The steel skyscrapers of metal and glass that frame the street and the house as a relic of another time seem destined for something other than human life.
The street name "Spital Yard" draws yet another level into the picture, one that seems almost like an ironization. The felt loneliness and the sense of having fallen out of time in viewing the lane with the old house is broken by the traditional horizon of expectation attached to a Spital, a hospital.
In the hospital, the person in need of help or injured expects healing, care or recovery from their sick condition. What they see, however, is exactly the opposite: felt unease, abandonment, superfluity. No healing anywhere. Hope, and the pull to stay within the yellow (sick?) lines of the path.
Typology as a Simultaneous, Weighing Experience of Seeing
Prof. (RS) Manfred ZimmermannIndustrial photographer
Transcript of the audio recording of January 27, 2019
Ladies and gentlemen,
I was asked to give a laudation for Roman Thomas today.
In truth, however, it will not be a real laudation: not because you are still very young, but because laudation means to praise someone. I believe we do not need that today, for we have your pictures here. These pictures praise you more than I could in words. For that reason, and because the two of us have known each other for a very long time, I would rather give a description of your work, a small glimpse into your life.
You were born in Celle in 1975, went to school there and grew up there. After your apprenticeship as a carpenter you gained your advanced technical college entrance qualification at the FOS Gestaltung; the next step was to be a degree in industrial design. The rejection of the portfolio you submitted there had something good about it: you followed your passion for photography, the very photography that was already laid down in your DNA. DNA because Roman Thomas's father was a trained photographer and passed on infinitely much to him. In his childhood Roman Thomas spent many years in the darkroom. What became of it we see here today, and it is truly remarkable.
Your first free works were made as early as 1999 in New Mexico. Through your ambitions toward the graphic you later broadened your creative spectrum and have since worked as a photographer and graphic designer for many renowned fashion labels. You also devote yourself strongly to architectural photography, among others for the company Vitra, which is active internationally both architecturally and in design. Through this you have the great fortune to photograph worldwide, in New York for instance.
In all these commercial processes you have always woven in your free works; this is where photographs like these came into being: these hidden places, the Hidden Places, but also the series of four, to which I will return later.
"HIDDEN PLACES", hidden locations: that is not quite right, for the places are not hidden at all. Each of us can see them, and still we would not perceive them this way. Not only because we are different people, with different eyes. Nor because Roman Thomas has a particularly trained eye, but because something else entirely lies within the motifs: the American painter Edward Hopper painted his "HIDDEN PLACES" as early as the thirties and forties to show the loneliness of human beings. In essence he painted not only, as you do, these entirely empty places; mostly solitary figures are visible, much as in your picture "WOMEN IN BLUE". Between his pictorial language and yours there is a great connection.
If one considers how hectic our cities are today, with their neon signs and the thousands upon thousands of pieces of information, then precisely this hectic pace is suddenly missing from your pictures. Now one might think you want to show the isolation of people in big cities; and yet your pictures have such a great radiance of calm and harmony that this does not really fit together.
And then one asks oneself whether your pictures are perhaps meant to show a renaissance of ourselves? Oversaturated by neon signs and a flood of information from the many mails, WhatsApp messages and Facebook posts. Perhaps your pictures show us the longing for calm, for calm for ourselves.
And I believe that in viewing your pictures it is indeed this felt detail: they produce a sense of well-being, an inner calm. That is the magic of your pictures.
About the technique of your photography I want to say nothing at all, for that is not so significant now. Far more significant is the large format of the works. They are fascinating not only because they are so beautifully large. Standing before them, they create the feeling of being able to enter the place. And that does after all have something to do with technique, which in your case is distinctly brilliant! One really believes one could feel the structure of the depicted wall with one's fingertips!
The pictures have a certain softness, not the razor-sharp hardness of digital photography; they have something human and something quite extraordinary.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In my photographic work I investigate space not as a fixed place but as something that only takes shape in the act of perception. I am interested in the moment in which outer reality, memory and inner images overlap and an experience arises that cannot be clearly determined.
What drives me is less the search for a motif than the question of how reality constitutes itself at all. I increasingly have the feeling that what we see never exists only in the outer world, but is always shaped by our own experiences, memories and expectations. Photography becomes for me a means of making precisely this transition visible, the moment in which the visible begins to shift. The starting point is often a real place. Yet in the photographic process it begins to change. What at first appears familiar increasingly withdraws from clear legibility. Between what we believe we recognize and what we actually see, a space opens in which perception becomes unstable. This instability interests me because it reveals something that usually remains hidden in everyday life.
In the series Hidden Places I work with urban spaces that at first glance appear unambiguous. Architecture, light and structure point to real places, to something seemingly known. At the same time a distance arises that makes these places appear removed. The images move in a tension between recognizability and irritation. They show not only a place but a state in which reality and imagination pass into one another. This engagement with outer space was a first step for me. Over time my gaze has shifted increasingly inward. The question of what we see became the question of how we see. Bound up with this is a growing interest in what cannot be clearly grasped, in the blurred region between perception and sensation.
In my current series Heimat I deliberately let go of the stability of the visible. Through the movement of the camera during the exposure, structures begin to flow. This moment is central for me because it joins control and openness. I give up part of the control and allow the image to change in the process. Something arises that I cannot fully foresee. Landscape no longer appears in these works as a fixed place but as an open fabric in which forms dissolve, condense and connect anew. What emerges is a pictorial space that can no longer be clearly traced back to an outer reality. Perception, memory and sensation are inseparably interwoven.
The notion of Heimat is deliberately ambivalent for me. It describes no concrete place but a state that changes again and again. It is about familiarity, but also about loss, about closeness and at the same time a certain distance. Heimat, for me, is nothing static but something that arises in experience and can withdraw again in the same moment.
Both bodies of work are joined by the question of how space becomes inwardly experienceable. While Hidden Places has its starting point in the outer world and carries it over into a subjective perception, in Heimat a space arises that develops entirely out of this inner movement. Nature and urban spaces are not opposites here but different manifestations of the same process. What interests me in the long term is not the image as a result but the process of seeing itself. Photography is for me a means of slowing this process down and making it visible. In this slowing down a space arises in which perception changes and new connections can emerge.
My works move between observation and transformation. They show no places in the classical sense but states in which perception, memory and experience overlap. In these states the idea of Heimat also arises for me, not as a geographic point but as an inner space that forms itself anew again and again in seeing.
My works travel, and sometimes I travel after them. In July 2026 an invitation from the Kaputa Association takes me to Hämeenlinna in Finland for two weeks, sustained by the long-standing cultural exchange between Celle and Hämeenlinna. There I work on my series "Heimat" in the Finnish light. In recent years, works from Hidden Places have been added to the art collection of KWS in Einbeck, one of the corporate collections joined together in the Arbeitskreis Corporate Collecting. In 2024 a four-part series of unique works was created for the head office of the Sparkasse Celle Gifhorn Wolfsburg in Gifhorn, four large-format works of 360×126 cm each, every motif dedicated to one of the locations that appear in the Sparkasse's name. On the executive floor they form a continuous narrative of the region.
Within his artistic portfolio, however, Roman Thomas focuses not only on the large but also on the small format. In these small-format works the artist uses what he has readily perceived to initiate a displacement whose aim is not only to counter, once more, the fundamental expectation placed on the photographic subject. The small-format photographs, the result of the artist's everyday gaze upon the reality surrounding him, camera in hand, become in the selective process of choosing the initiators of a familiar and yet unaccustomed situation of reception.
In typologies consisting of four small-format photographs, each valid on its own, the artist concretizes a self-contained interplay of past, present and conditioning future. The genuinely non-simultaneous, which found its way to materialization in the photographs in the form of successive moments, is from now on present in a present simultaneity. Set in fixed arrangement, the photographs brought together are able to initiate a momentariness that can now take place far from the depictive quality presumed in the images themselves. No longer the contemplation of past moments, but the production, created through linkage, of present urgency is the consequence the viewer encounters in the typological form of presentation.
Typology as a simultaneous, weighing experience of seeing
For the medium of photography, the typological mode of presentation has been of grave significance. The possibility of comparative seeing, previously at times exposed to curatorial arbitrariness, became a fixed component of the work itself. Declarations of similarity, which at first lay outside the artist's hand, could in principle be internalized, negotiated with intention and finally made into the work-immanent task of seeing for each viewer. A self-contained pictorial mission, determined by an overarching simultaneity, has become a present object of contemplation. The viewer was thereby confronted for the first time with being able to carry out, in a deliberately set pictorial field, a way of seeing that before was mostly arbitrary and merely inclined toward comparison.
The form of presentation thus gained, which can also be found in extensively used measure in Roman Thomas's artistic portfolio, created out of the seemingly captured momentary a really occurring moment of urgent presence. This moment is defined by the creative process inherent in the typological arrangement: reordering, determination and the acceptance of a self-imposed limitation. The fixation of the transient, hoped for in the making of countless photographs and yet doomed to fail, usually ends in an equally self-contained accumulation of photographic images. By selectively narrowing the mass of images and carrying them over into a present context of simultaneous mutual contextualization, Thomas creates, supported by an artistic framing, a newly conceived experience of seeing of present relevance that reaches into the future.
The typologies of the German artist are, in an age of image transience in which an inflationary succession of ever faster frequency steadily displaces the comparative side-by-side of images, a chance to arrive, with the help of the all too fleeting, at moments that no single image can depict, but that only the typological works, in their inherent task of seeing, are able to form.
Roman Thomas of course knows the icons of visual art that take human loneliness and abandonment as their theme, and he refers to them.
But the social themes of gender relations also find a subtle place in his large-format works.
"Woman in Blue" plays with these themes. In front of a graffiti-sprayed wall a woman walks past in a long violet dress with a headscarf of the same color and a long earth-colored coat. On the wall four male figures are depicted as graffiti. They are all larger than life and indistinctly rendered, standing in different positions turned toward the viewer. The color of the woman's long coat corresponds with the dark, muted colors of the male figures.
The woman walks past the wall from right to left. She has already passed three of the four depicted men. The men are shown as half figures. They all look to the ground. Their respective posture recalls that of men urinating while standing. Yet what they are doing is not recognizable. The world of the men is indecipherable and left to speculation.
Evidently the men and the woman come from a similar stratum of people who prefer similar colors of clothing, even if the violet of the woman's dress stands out slightly. Violet, read in color symbolism as contemplation and humility, leaves room for interpretation here.
Still, the association with poor or lower social strata remains, possibly even with groups of people of a non-Christian migration background, since the woman's headscarf and skin color and the men's physiognomies suggest this.
Their different postures are not related to one another. And yet the woman and the male figures appear like ciphers of their respective role models and social positions. The woman is de-individualized by her clothing. She is the only living person in the picture. The male figures are static, but rendered toward the viewer. One sees them from the front or in profile. What each of them is doing is only hinted at, because half of each figure is missing. Still, this confrontation with the viewer takes effect. The woman crosses the picture unmoved and takes notice neither of the graffiti men nor of the viewer.
The experience of seeing, however, marks for the men a behavior that in public can also be read as a demonstration of power. Even if it concerns a possible misconduct (public urination). This is permitted in public only to men or children. Women can relieve themselves only hidden away, not in full public view.
The sphere of the men, through their placement as an image on the wall and their larger-than-life size, is set higher overall than that of the woman on the pavement. She is the base and the lower anchor of the picture.
Above her as the base and the graffiti men, both laid out as human levels, divided horizontally by the top of the wall, another level appears. It is shaped by architecture in the form of modern apartment blocks. Geometric forms, the rectangles and squares of windows and blocks of masonry, structure the architecture. Housing units are to be presumed there. But the inhabitants themselves cannot be seen, nowhere. Again only ciphers of human life. No people anywhere, not as image and not as silhouette.
And higher still, in the upper third of the picture, the sky appears. A small patch of overcast sky can be made out at the center. It is reflected, refracted many times, in the window panes of the apartment blocks. Nature confined to quarters, and human existence on the ground. Lonely, and locked into gender relations.
Thus the themes of loneliness, power and energy, but also understanding and quotations of motifs from other artists, are reflected in the work of Roman Thomas.
The truth of what took place is the basis of Roman Thomas's works. Beyond that, the invisibility of montage and the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous are to be found in Roman Thomas.
These ideas of composition also appear in the works of his famous photographer colleague Andreas Gursky. Composition and alteration, which occur in Thomas's pictures invisibly and seemingly organically, make the works exciting. So does the transience of the motifs, which often no longer exist soon after Roman Thomas has photographed them, since they are continuously changed. Only the motif and the encounter with the photographer make Thomas's pictures unique.
If for the Bechers it was still the documentary quality of industrial plants shortly before demolition, plants that had elementally shaped the world of work and space, for Thomas it is the fleeting in the twenty-first century.
The graffiti surfaces that appear and disappear, or the shop-window displays designed ever anew. The fleeting is held fast in the photograph and so becomes the cipher of a time. These elements are emphasized by Thomas. They can play a prominent or a restrained role in the overall composition, more intense in color or more subdued. How the artist decides remains the compositional secret of the photographer.
In viewing Roman Thomas's works there remains the feeling of seeing excerpts from a whole film or from the life of a city. Real and comprehensible, artful and somewhat cool and distanced: that is the fascination of Roman Thomas's works.
The conceptual closeness and the altering of reality by photographic and artistic means certainly place Roman Thomas in the tradition of some of the Becher students and the Düsseldorf school of photography, though he did not receive his training there.
An artistic understanding, a photographic eye and the desire to realize composition and rigor in a real, found motif: these make up Roman Thomas's works.
Take, for example, "OLD HOUSE", which, incidentally, immediately made me think of the artist Gerd Winner and his motifs of the Docklands. Although your motif was taken in London's financial district, the coloring of the houses and the yellow marking of the streets are strongly reminiscent of the Docklands.
That, by the way, is another such picture: not a single person is to be seen, and still it touches you. One feels the temptation to venture a step inside and walk around the corner to the left or right.
It is similar with the picture behind me, "WHITBY STREET". That is an utterly fascinating photograph. Part of the picture is actually not a picture at all but a metallic mirror reflecting the artworks in its surroundings. Roman told me that this anthracite-colored wall has since been redesigned entirely; so in the truest sense of the word this photograph is a unique piece that can never be photographed in this form again.
Let us now consider the picture at the very back left, "WOMEN IN BLUE". This picture is strongly reminiscent of the painter Edward Hopper. It is fascinating that here, on the one hand, a real person was photographed and, on the other, other people were painted. And these painted people show us a great loneliness. Although some are painted and the other person is real, the picture appears so unreal, as if it simply could not exist this way. It has rather something of a painting, and it is entirely unimportant whether it is photography or painting: your pictures often seem as if they were painted photorealistically.
It is exactly the same with the picture "STEPS TO HEAVEN", where the viewer has the feeling of being able to walk straight up the stairs. This magic of the picture makes one wish to walk it and to grasp it, to find out what might be up there at the end of the stairs.
Or the picture "UNITED COLORS", the color coding from Paris. A picture strongly divided in two by the object on the left side. It looks like a colored QR code or barcode with which one could scan an entire life, an entire society.
Your works pose so many questions to us; precisely that makes it so interesting to engage with them.
Alongside the "HIDDEN PLACES", Roman Thomas has for many years also been composing the series of four. Whenever the opportunity arises, he goes in search of a new motif. The series of four thus show situations and places that happened to cross his path. And at the end of the year he extracts, from the many thousands of pictures, pairs and groups that share a similar formal language, a similar symbolic power, and that, put together, form a picture of their own again.
And that is something truly exciting, for all these pictures have different places of reference: Potsdam, Paris or New York.
But they always have one thing in common, a shared formal language shaped by Roman Thomas. In this way a new picture arises, a European or worldly picture, without an explicit place.
I said earlier that your pictures have a great radiance. Your pictures speak for themselves. And I can only wish you still more success for your professional future. In 2018 you were admitted to the Bund der bildenden Künstler und Künstlerinnen (BBK). I congratulate you on that. I have known you for many years, and you are growing more and more from commercial photography into the artistic field. That pleases me greatly, and just as an aside: Edward Hopper did study illustration and painting, but for the first twenty-two years he could not live from it at all. He worked as an illustrator in an advertising agency and sold his first picture only in 1942, for 250 dollars. That corresponds roughly to the price of your pictures today. So I wish you, with all appreciation of art, that you also have commercial success with your pictures and perhaps one day can even live from them. All the best for your future, and to the listeners many thanks for your attention.