Funny Fence

About the Photographer

Bamberger, Tom

American, b. 1948

Tom Bamberger creates digital panoramas to question how far one can convincingly expand the horizon line of an image. Bamberger extends views of places such as housing developments, farmland, highways, and vineyards, by drawing and repeating information from single negatives. He likens the process to cultivating a virus, explaining that, "in either a computer or a Petri dish, something reproduces itself until it reaches a critical mass where you can see it with greater clarity." By blurring the line between his digital alterations and the existing shape of the landscape, he questions the nature of repetition, arguing that there is little difference between, for example, DNA's reproductive process in a forest or field and the computer cloning that his work depends on.

Tom Bamberger attended Boston University and later completed an MFA at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he studied philosophy and taught mathematical logic. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of the Photographic Arts, San Diego; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many others. He served as an adjunct curator of photography at the Milwaukee Art Museum for ten years.