Identify: Marie Tomanova
Age: 36
Hometown: Mikulov, Czech Republic, a castle-laden city close to the Austrian border.
Now Lives: In a one-bedroom condominium on the Decrease East Aspect of Manhattan together with her husband, Thomas Beachdel, an artwork historian and curator.
Declare to Fame: Ms. Tomanova is a photographer and wide-eyed documentarian of New York who makes use of her Contax T3 digicam to seize metropolis membership youngsters, gallery habitués and no matter denizens of rooftop events and East Village parks occur to cross her path. “I take footage to seize a sense of closeness,” she mentioned.
In an introduction to Ms. Tomanova’s 2019 photograph e-book, “Younger American,” the photographer Ryan McGinley wrote, “I want all of America’s youth tradition seemed like Marie’s photographs of downtown.”
Huge Break: After graduating with a grasp’s diploma in portray from the Brno College of Expertise within the Czech Republic, Ms. Tomanova moved to Greensboro, N.C., in 2011 to work as an au pair. The US was “a particularly unknown entity to me that represented a world completely completely different to the place I grew up,” she mentioned. A 12 months later, at 27, she moved to White Plains, N.Y., to work with a special household and commenced making weekend journeys to New York Metropolis.
She met her future husband on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, standing in entrance of Gauguin’s “Two Tahitian Women.” And a 2012 exhibition of labor by the photographer Francesca Woodman on the Guggenheim impressed her to change out her paint brushes for movie. In 2015, Ms. Tomanova’s nude self-portrait was included in a gaggle present on the Los Angeles gallery On the Ground Floor. “Just a few years later, I turned the digicam to different folks,” she mentioned.
Newest Venture: “New York New York,” a e-book of her pictures that includes textual content by Mr. Beachdel (with a foreword by Kim Gordon), was simply revealed by the German artwork imprint Hatje Cantz . “Discovering Magic Collectively,” an accompanying solo exhibition, goes on view at C24 Gallery in New York on Oct. 7. “Sitting at house engaged on a e-book was a pleasant approach to spend the pandemic,” Ms. Tomanova mentioned. “The arduous half is all the time that there are such a lot of nice photographs and a restricted variety of pages.”
Subsequent Factor: A set of autobiographical portraits (her grandmother’s lipsticks, horses tied up at her household’s snow-covered farm), which had been exhibited on the Rencontres d’Arles in France, will likely be proven on the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in Xiamen, China, in November.
Digicam Prepared: A documentary on Ms. Tomanova’s profession, directed by the Czech filmmaker Marie Dvorakova, is within the works. The venture gives an intimate portrait of her photographic profession, together with the nervous cab journey she took to her first solo present in New York in 2018 and her first journey again house to see her mom in virtually a decade.
“Though my mother is older and doesn’t prefer to be on digicam, she was filmed within the automotive when she went to choose me up on the airport,” Ms. Tomanova mentioned. “It was so emotional and wonderful.”