ARTIST STATEMENT:

 

My name is Eric Thome, and I have thousands of photographs to publish in the future. Creating photo galleries on this website will be a continuous process, and I invite you to view them. Due to the expense and time involved in making books, I will publish my photographs on occidentalphotography.com, where they will be for sale as prints in various sizes, with options to purchase prints framed or unframed.

 

The diverse subject matter of my photography includes abstraction, architecture, cultures, ghost towns and cemeteries, historic mines and mills, landscapes, railroads, retro advertising and neon signs, Native American rock art, ruins, street and urban scenes, vintage automobiles, wildlife and more.

 

When shooting these various subjects, I also take aerial photographs, multiple exposures (taken in-camera), and macro photography.

 

My neon and light bulb sign photos primarily include signs from the 1930s through the 1970s, shot in the daytime, twilight and at night.

 

Through photography, I focus on visually preserving past eras and their remains (which are further vanishing) and creating works of visual art when I see something that interests me. When photographing, I try to capture as much historical accuracy from a given period as possible, down to the minor details. I prefer authenticity, and my style embraces the grit, decay, sun-bleached fading, layered paint, patina, rust and weathering of time rather than non-original paint jobs and restorations. However, that is only one subject style of my on-location photos, and I also photograph maintained, restored and repainted historic buildings, signs, automobiles, and other subjects.

 

My goal is to take photos that look as much as possible like the time period the subject matter is from, whether it is a western ghost town from the 1850s through the early 1900s, an Art Deco era urban scene, a Great Depression era farm or ranch, a World War II era site or a Mid-century modern location from the 1950s to early 1970s. I also enjoy the overlapping of eras as this is how American towns and cities evolved, including ghost towns before abandonment. For example, a building may be from the late 1800s, but there may have been architectural style changes or additions through the decades, such as Mid-century advertising, neon signs, or automobiles in the composition.

 

I find artistic inspiration when researching historical photographs (especially color Kodachrome photos from the 1950s), fine art photographers from the past and classic movies from the eras of subject matter I photograph. Some of my favorite Mid-century color fine art photographers are Saul Leiter and Ernst Haas, who I have become aware of since 2020, further progressing the development of my photographic compositions. Fred Herzog's photographs are also exciting and a 2020 inspiration to me. Charles W. Cushman has a fantastic color photo archive from the 1940s and 1950s from the American West, Mexican/United States Bordertowns, San Francisco, Chicago and more online.

 

Concerning photographing the American West and the Old West in particular, historic photographs from boom towns, frontier sites, homesteads, mines and ranches often show buildings that were unpainted wood, ramshackle, and primitive.

 

Ghost towns frequently look very similar to their early years when they were new and populated, despite over a century passing and being dilapidated.

 

Materials not often thought of as being from the Old West, like tar paper, concrete, and utility poles, were used in the early 1900s. Concrete was developed by the ancient Egyptians and widely used by the Romans. Tar paper was in use on a small scale in the early 1800s in the United States until 1847, when Samuel and Cyrus Warren began using inexpensive coal tar instead of pine pitch to develop a composite roofing product. Metal roofing was also used in the 1800s, besides typical wood shingles. For example, historical pictures from the desert mining camps of Nevada and the Death Valley, California region show that tar paper was used on roofs and the sides of wood buildings for weather-proofing in the first decade of the 1900s before becoming a more prevalent material throughout the United States during the Great Depression.

 

Ghost town buildings were rarely built to last, adding to my fascination that they are even in existence in my lifetime.

 

 

Also visit eric-thome.com for Eric Thome's photography books:

 

Photos of the American West: Ghost Towns, Nature, Cities and More (Volume One)

Take a journey around the American West with over 50 full-page color photographs on high-quality gloss paper in this 124-page, 8 1/2" x 11" book. Fine art photograph subjects in this book include advertising, ghost towns, historic architecture, landscapes, Native American rock art, neon signs, old west artifacts, ruins, wildlife, and more.

 

Photos of the Native American West:

Ancient Architecture, Rock Art, Taos Pueblo and More

Take a trip to historic Native American sites (from Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington) via more than 50 full-page color photographs on high-quality gloss paper. Photographs from the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico (a World Heritage Site continuously occupied for around 1,000 years) comprise about one-third of the photos in this book. Other photo subjects include petroglyphs and pictographs (from hundreds to thousands of years ago) created by Archaic, Ancestral Puebloan, Fremont, Ute, Shoshone, Northern Paiute and Yokuts people (or their ancestors) and geoglyphs (similar to Peru's famous Nazca Lines) from the Aha Macav (Mojave) or Quechan (Yuma) people. This book also contains photos of cliff dwellings, ancient architecture and ruins from the Ancestral Pueblo and Sinagua cultures, paintings from California Mission Indians (under the direction of a Spanish artist) in the 1821 Mission San Miguel Arcàngel, the remains of a Ghost Dance circle (from the 1872-73 Modoc War), a Tlingit Totem Pole and more.