Thomas Roma: By Not Knowing, I Did It.
Straight photography, following the medium, is intoxicating — trying to wrestle it into the form of a poem
— Thomas Roma
The latest episode of the excellent photography podcast The Halftone is a fascinating, rambling conversation with Thomas Roma, littered with anecdotes, detours and apparent non sequiturs that eventually reveal themselves as signposts to greater ideas. It’s also filled with gems like this:
I’m gonna tell you one of the secrets to having a life that seems long and interesting… you must do things that you’re not good at.
Earlier this year I picked up Roma’s ‘The Waters of Our Time’, a 2013 collaboration with his son Giancarlo that combines the elder Roma’s photographs with a fictional first-person narrative written by the younger man in the voice of an older woman.
It’s small size and beautiful layout (a tribute to — really, a detailed facsimile of — Roy De Carava and Langston Hughes’ 1955 book ‘The Sweet Flypaper of Life’) is intimate and inviting. It fits in a jacket pocket, which makes me want to carry it around with me, like O’Hara’s ‘Lunch Poems’ or a treasured notebook. It’s the kind of book that deserves to travel, to wear its miles on its fraying corners; to be pulled out on bus rides or tossed onto a bar while waiting for a friend to show up. It will suit it’s scars and be at it’s best once it’s a little worn, like all the best things. Some photography books are momentous; great works etched permanently into the world with booming voices. Others are subtle creatures, shape-shifters that creep up and whisper riddles into our ears. ‘The Waters of Our Time’ is one of these. I go back to it often, and each time it feels a little different, as though the words and images shift, unseen, every time I close the cover.
In listening to Roma speak, the pictures he makes begin to fall into place. His photography is both honest and illusory. He takes stark facts and builds mysteries out of them. On The Halftone interview he talks around subjects, wandering obliquely into stories from his past that seem completely unrelated to photography until they are twisted into a clarifying statement that illustrates not so much what his photography is about, but why it exists at all. The first ten minutes alone is a joy to listen to, so I’ve transcribed the highlights here:
Most of us have the opportunity to be fairly comfortable compared to the rest of the world. So what happens, in that comfort, is very early on… little by little people are funneled into categories. You’re the funny one in class, you’re the good athlete. Someone else can speak foreign languages. To be on the debate team, you have to be good at it. Well what if you want to be on the debate team, but you’re no good? “Well there’s no room for you. Find something you’re good at”. People are always doing what they’re good at. I don’t do that. I’m the exact opposite. I do whatever I want to do, and I’m not good!
I love the idea that one thing I do does not predict the next thing. Robert Frost said… the object is to make one poem sound as different as possible from another poem. He didn’t say they had to mean different things, but you have to give someone a reason to read the next one.
I take that to mean that photographs should look different. Not superficially look different… but we should be investigating the time and place of our lives. That’s what’s so interesting; everything about photography, everything, has to do with time. The light and the exposure, the amount of time I have to develop the film, the amount of time it takes to dry, the exposure for the print… it’s all spending my allotment of time. And that’s an amazingly interesting thing for me.
This idea — that you should pursue things that you don’t know how to do precisely for the reason that you don’t know how to do them— seems like the perfect answer to the problem of creative stagnation. This is something we all struggle with, and there is no shortage of books, blog posts and opinion pieces on how to overcome it. What’s particularly interesting to me is Roma’s view that the subject matter (and our personal reaction to it), rather than any aesthetic methodology, is the key to progress. In addition, by being true to our place in the world; by engaging with the now, and with our own current self, we already have everything we need to make creative breakthroughs. The ever-changing world, the evolution of both our internal and external environments, the linearity of time itself, provide the means by which we can grow as artists. We just have to take that difficult step outside our ‘category’ and into something we’re not good at, something we don’t already know:
I made my first camera in 1972, and the reason I did it is that I didn’t know how to do it, and I assumed it was going to be easy. If I would have known how difficult it would be to build that first one I never would have started. I’m not an idiot — I never would have taken the first step! I wouldn’t have done it. But by not knowing, I did it.
Roma also makes a great point about learning by doing. Whilst there is usually an end goal to creative projects, going directly to that goal removes the process of exploration that better equips us to develop a broader capability as artists:
This is the problem with teaching. Most teaching is training. I’m very interested in learning. So learning isn’t figuring it out first. Learning is, give me the parameters, let me see what it takes, and then I’ll try things. And I keep trying things, and then I become that person that did all those things.
You can see more of Thomas Roma’s work here, and watch a short TEDx talk he gave at Columbia College here.
Also, go check out The Halftone. It’s an excellent listen (I particularly recommend the interviews with Christian Patterson, Bryan Schutmat, and the printer Thomas Palmer).
