Thomas Cummins

Thomas Cummins is an American visual artist who exhibits internationally and is best known for his large format panoramic lightboxes which display deep focus photographs of nocturnal psychogeography.
Life and work
Cummins is a flâneur practicing urban exploration and dérive in order to photograph how individuals create identity through their surrounding environment. He infiltrates hostile environments such as abandoned buildings, private property, hotels, hauntings, and other urban stigmatized properties in order to record how the self is created through basic impulses for self-preservation, pareidolia, and other forms of simulacra found in ideas of reference and to explore common Kafkaesque themes such as abandonment, freedom, alienation, angst, despair, facticity, absurdism, and authenticity.
His uncanny and oneiric photos display how architecture constructs our mental space and how individuals use predetemined structures, crypsis, and dramaturgy to both evade and conform to the surveillance and Gaze of the Other.
His focus on structures and use of self-reference, metafiction, and détournement often defines his work as Institutional Critique.

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