Tom Artin is a photographer and musician living in Rockland County, New York. His subjects range from landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes to portraits, florals, and still lifes. Artin's photographs are black and white and exploit the broad range of tonality and subtlety that the medium affords. His work is simple, straightforward, and painterly; his eye for composition and understanding of the subject is matched by his attention to detail and craft.
Artin was born in Bloomington, Indiana. In the early 1950s Artin began taking, developing, and printing images. He outfitted a darkroom at home, and devoted his high-school senior chemistry project to the chemistry of photography, which included fabricating and printing on his own photographic paper. Artin earned both a B.A. (1960) and a Ph.D. (1968) in comparative literature from Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Artin's photographic career ran parallel to a career as a medieval scholar and college teacher, which he left in 1979 to pursue a full-time career as a jazz musician.
In recent decades, Artin's work has been primarily fine-art photography, though he has created fashion and music photography for print and for websites. Artin continues to travel around the world capturing light-rich studies of people and places.
