A contact form was submitted:

title: contact

subject: Contact Form Submitted

email: thomas@allemanphoto.com

phone: 310-963-0358

message:

Hi Jonathan, It was great to see you and spend some time in Santa Fe. I hope you're well, during these post-election days of numbed disbelief and early-falling darkness. The night comes too early, and might be here to stay... Anyhoo. I just learned that the Guggenheim folks have begun asking my reference folks for their letters. I didn't think this would happen just yet, so I'm scrambling to catch up by giving you two pieces of overdue information... A) If you haven't already, please put competition@gf.org into your contacts, so that their letter to you won't bounce into the SPAM folder. In fact, you might double-check that it's not already there, cowering amongst the come-ons from Nigerian con-men... B) Please take a minute, when its convenient, to read through my Proposal to them. (I've copied it below.) That's a lot to ask, I know---and you actually don't have to, in order to write your reference letter---but knowing what I've told them I want to accomplish might help you reflect on how best to discuss your knowledge of my work. Beyond that, I leave you to do this task as you see fit. Please do know that I'm very, very grateful for this deep favor you're doing me, and I'll be delighted to repay it whenever you ask. So, please don't hesitate to ask, whenever, whatever... Have a great Thanksgiving! Best regards, TOM ALLEMAN Los Angeles 310-963-0358 THOMAS ALLEMAN PROJECT PLANS Guggenheim Fellowship Submission Support Materials As my resume and the narrative biography I’ve submitted will demonstrate, most of my mature work has been done in Los Angeles. Indeed, if it isn’t too cloying to say, LA has been my muse for 25 years. But it wasn’t always thus. In 1988 I left San Francisco, a vibrant city I dearly loved, to take a newspaper job in LA, whose flat, bleak, sunbaked landscape alienated me for several years. I’ve since learned that my comfort in any specific environment is, for better or worse, a function or my desire to photograph in that place, and, over time, that certainly proved true of Los Angeles: I began to see that its dreariness held some strange pictorial possibilities, and the slow-motion visual chaos of that sprawling wreckage was in fact a very inviting subject for my photographic attentions. As my eye for local detail sharpened, and my portfolios of such pictures grew, my affection bloomed. Now, I “love” it here---like one loves a ne’er-do-well uncle or an errant sister---and my mission, these last fifteen years, has been to reveal the cracked essence of this place that is otherwise so misrepresented in the American psyche. Since I began my career as a newspaper and magazine photojournalist, I’m quite conversant with the wide variety of skills, techniques and camera formats that those kinds of publications demand of their contributors; one is trained to always “get a picture”, with whatever lens or film is at hand. So, my personal work is similarly protean: I’ve created series with 35mm film cameras and black-and-white film, medium-format cameras and color film, panoramic cameras, 4x5 cameras and Polaroid film, and $30 plastic cameras with screwy lenses. I’ve recently been making street photographs with a brilliant medical ringflash, and I’m looking forward to beginning a series that exploits the ability of modified digital cameras to photograph in the infrared spectrum of light. So, my work here in Los Angeles has ranged widely, and will continue to do so. Because LA has been failed by the prevailing mandate among cultural gatekeepers, which urges photographers to be single-minded in their process, point-of-view and choice of tools. But this place is so varied, and its diverse ecologies so complicated in their interaction with one another, that one monolithic approach isn’t sufficient to the task. Nor is a single portfolio, or a single book. So, my aim is to create a dozen portfolios, each 20-30 pictures deep, each distinct in technique and “feel”, which in their aggregate will suggest the multi-faceted, many-voiced narrative that Los Angeles so deserves. Three of these portfolios are finished, and those will be represented in the samples I send in support of this application. I’ve just begun two newer bodies of work, some of which will also be included in that sample. As I said, above, I have in mind another new series, which uses infrared cameras to photograph diptychs which reveal the traces we leave on the hilly desert landscape here: the crumbling, abandoned stairways which once climbed up and over those hills, connecting neighborhoods, and the paths worn into the earth by pedestrians who know better than developers and sidewalk pavers where the best routes are for their daily rambles. Further, I foresee a series that demonstrates, somehow, the view Los Anglenos have of one another from their cars. Also, I want to create another series of diptychs that pair pictures of the two “rivers” that traverse the region: our Los Angeles River, a fifty-mile cement watercourse that’s clogged with all the flotsam that flows down from the San Fernando Valley, and, on the other hand, the “river” that our great freeways represent, half-submerged below neighborhoods, walled off sometimes, raging and meandering or standing stock still. I intend to develop other portfolios, which will collect pictures that depict the way houses and streets cling to the abrupt hilliness of the landscape, and the way that fences and walls are used with such profusion and imagination in working class neighborhoods, creating art, identity and a baffling vibe of hyper-security, all at once. And the way the light here operates in its best and worst versions: the microwave glare of midday, brilliant and bilious, and the creamy pastel hues of our long, lingering twilight idylls, and the low, fluorescent glow of our evenings, when the billion lights of the city bounce back into the basin and create a blanket of orange and green over these hills and houses. I’ve spent many years circling around this moment: I’m so deeply experienced in my career, and adept at my photographic practice, and conversant with the subject of my passion---the built environment of Los Angeles---that I’m now poised to leap into the deep end of this pool and create a strong, expressive, edifying diversity of work about this essential American city. With the help of the Guggenheim Foundation, I can make that leap, and devote myself to this hurly-burly project. Thank you very much for considering my application!