Look Inside
Which art books, prints and posters are available by and about this artist? Here is a sample of items of interest to a typical collector:
Peter Tomka, American, b. 1989, Des Moines, IA
Despite their size, Tomka’s black-and-white photographic prints feel intimate. They are not mementos to be carried in a pocket close to the heart but inhabiting them visually, brings you close to Tomka’s heart. This results from factors standard to photography: cropping, framing, saturation, and depth of field manipulate the image and the audience. But Tomka’s photographs go further by placing the viewer in media res, where vision is blurred. Hands reach too close, bodies stutter, eyes plead, “Please don’t tell.” The photographs often start as casual pictures. They then undergo a complex analog printing process that he has devised. Using his (blacked-out) one-room apartment as a camera, Tomka projects digital images onto photographic paper using a coatrack as a shutter. The photographs are developed in his bathtub. Sometimes one image can generate numerous photographic iterations. The artist’s intense and time-consuming labor also seems to imprint itself on the image—in the subtle traces of borders misaligning or blacks that are a little soft. All of the many decisions he makes between his footage and the museum’s walls occlude rather than sharpen vision. What’s left is a hazy hallucination. It could be Tomka’s. But the absent details encourage anonymity, and those spaces that have been blurred and veiled can belong to all.
Double Player is an unconventional photographic book form that demands to be experienced by two people. This work unfolds and folds back into itself—a Möbius loop of imagery, or perhaps an ouroboros: an endless cycle of visual connections shared in real time between both viewers.
Loosely inspired by the structure of a deck of playing cards, Double Player weaves together five distinct bodies of work—Bachelor Suite (2024), Heatwave Suite (2024), Watering Hole (2023), Three Works (2021), and Paternity Test (2021)—shuffled into a whole that reveals surprising connections and through-lines. The book strikingly opens with the word GAYLORD—in another context, the name of a legendary Los Angeles apartment complex, but here, a directive that sets the tone and calls the viewer to engage immediately with the ensuing images.
The photographs are either created by the artist in a performative manner or appropriated from cinema, television, and pop culture, past and present. The circulation and repetition of motifs invite collaboration and reflection, emphasizing the act of shared viewing as part of the work’s meaning. The book collides ( both literally and metaphorically) at the halfway point, designed to be exactly the same from front to back—revealing no beginning or end, but rather an infinite loop that can be entered from any point.
Double Player was published on the occasion of Peter Tomka’s inclusion in Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, which opened in 2025. It marks the artist’s first monograph.