Winner of grants from the America the Beautiful Fund and New York State Council of the Arts, as well as recipient of both the Suffolk County Film Commission and Telly Awards, Tom Romeo has been recognized for his work as a 'storyteller' who's choice of medium has always fit his choice of subject. As a writer, photographer, digital artist, producer, poet and performer, he immerses himself in both topic and technique to create beautiful images in real life and in the mind and soul of the viewer. A devotee of film photography/chemical darkroom and anolog video shooting and editing, the move to the digital realm in both these media excited his imagination and set him off on an exploration which led him to the 'Modigraph' - a word of his own creation which describes his body of work consisting of digitally MODIfied photoGRAPHS.
“Most of my work starts in the natural world with a photograph. I then bring this photograph into the digital realm to see if and how it might inspire a re-imagining of the original image. Many times, I just utilize the computer as a 'digital darkroom' to experiment with cropping, exposure, color balance, etc. just as I had in the traditional darkroom. Other times, I'm inspired by shape or color or theme and totally modify the image into something that better expresses the picture I have in my mind. This can result in an “enhanced reality”, abstract images or totally original mindscapes created from combining elements from several different photos.
I love this process and can get lost for days working on a piece pixel by pixel until I get it just the way I want it.”
