thomas allen

January 8th, 2009 · 3 Comments

These images by Thomas Allen are so cool – and it’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder why you haven’t seen it before. Simple and smart.

Here’s an excerpt from the Joseph Bellows Gallery’s press release on Thomas Allen:

Allen’s photographs are inspired by his childhood experiences with pop-up books and View-Masters. He begins his process by cutting figures and images out of illustrated pages of old books and vintage fiction novels. Allen then cleverly rearranges and juxtaposes the forms to create three-dimensional scenes. Next, he carefully lights his subjects and photographs the scenes.

As a director would stage actors, Allen stages his cut-outs in ways that create humor, tension, mystery, and drama. A boxer fights his own shadow in Spar, and in Bookend a gunfighter stands over his recently fallen opponent. Although the characters are freed from the closed pages of books, the books themselves still remain present in each photograph. A ship sails across the curved pages of a dictionary-sized book in Swell. In Cover, a gunman finds safety behind the spine of a book. And in Recover, a worn paperback acts as a life raft to three weathered shipwreck survivors.”