A Fresh Perspective on Downtown Youth Culture

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Identify: Marie Tomanova

Age: 36

Hometown: Mikulov, Czech Republic, a castle-laden town near the Austrian border.

Now Life: In a a single-bedroom apartment on the Reduced East Facet of Manhattan with her husband, Thomas Beachdel, an artwork historian and curator.

Claim to Fame: Ms. Tomanova is a photographer and vast-eyed documentarian of New York who utilizes her Contax T3 digital camera to capture town club children, gallery habitués and regardless of what denizens of rooftop events and East Village parks transpire to cross her path. “I consider pictures to seize a experience of closeness,” she said.

In an introduction to Ms. Tomanova’s 2019 picture e book, “Young American,” the photographer Ryan McGinley wrote, “I want all of America’s youth tradition appeared like Marie’s shots of downtown.”

Significant Break: Following graduating with a master’s degree in portray from the Brno College of Technological innovation in the Czech Republic, Ms. Tomanova moved to Greensboro, N.C., in 2011 to work as an au pair. The United States was “an exceptionally unfamiliar entity to me that represented a entire world fully diverse to exactly where I grew up,” she claimed. A year later on, at 27, she moved to White Plains, N.Y., to get the job done with a distinct family and started earning weekend journeys to New York Metropolis.

She fulfilled her upcoming spouse at the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, standing in entrance of Gauguin’s “Two Tahitian Girls.” And a 2012 exhibition of function by the photographer Francesca Woodman at the Guggenheim motivated her to swap out her paint brushes for film. In 2015, Ms. Tomanova’s nude self-portrait was involved in a team show at the Los Angeles gallery On the Floor Flooring. “A couple of yrs later, I turned the digicam to other people,” she reported.

Most current Challenge: “New York New York,” a e book of her images showcasing text by Mr. Beachdel (with a foreword by Kim Gordon), was just released by the German artwork imprint Hatje Cantz . “Finding Magic With each other,” an accompanying solo exhibition, goes on look at at C24 Gallery in New York on Oct. 7. “Sitting at property working on a ebook was a nice way to invest the pandemic,” Ms. Tomanova claimed. “The tough aspect is constantly that there are so quite a few excellent photos and a confined amount of webpages.”

Up coming Issue: A assortment of autobiographical portraits (her grandmother’s lipsticks, horses tied up at her family’s snow-coated farm), which had been exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles in France, will be demonstrated at the Jimei x Arles Global Image Competition in Xiamen, China, in November.

Digital camera Prepared: A documentary on Ms. Tomanova’s profession, directed by the Czech filmmaker Marie Dvorakova, is in the works. The job presents an personal portrait of her photographic job, which includes the nervous cab experience she took to her very first solo demonstrate in New York in 2018 and her first journey back again home to see her mother in nearly a decade.

“Even though my mother is older and does not like to be on digicam, she was filmed in the auto when she went to decide on me up at the airport,” Ms. Tomanova explained. “It was so emotional and remarkable.”