NEW YORK, NY.- Derek Eller Gallery announced the passing of Thomas Barrow (1938-2024). Barrow lived and worked in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and had solo exhibitions with the gallery in 2013, 2015, 2019, and 2020.

Since the 1960s when he was a student of Aaron Siskind, Barrow pioneered new photographic methods and challenged the structural limits of photography by pushing the medium into unprecedented forms. As such, he holds a firm place in the history of fine art photography.

For his most well-known series Cancellations (1974-1981), Barrow responded to the disparate photographic trends of the mid-70’s: the survey-like, documentary approach to the American landscape as practiced by New Topographics photographers including Lewis Baltz and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Barrow desired to utilize photography in a more manipulative, experimental fashion. To that end, he photographed banal urban spaces and open terrain throughout the Southwest, and then aggressively tore through the emulsion on the negatives with an ice pick, marking them with an X.

Barrow’s restless experimentation with photographic materiality led him to a series of photographic sculpture in the late 1970s, including the Caulked Reconstructions. In the years that followed, Barrow’s interest in cultural cataloguing and transgressing the limitations of the photographic print developed simultaneously, giving rise to an array of sculptural assemblages. In these, Barrow juxtaposes Polaroids of appropriated film and television imagery with non-art objects such as plastic toys, ceramics, and books; the caulk and spray paint remain as formal motifs.

Through this work, Barrow can be considered on a spectrum which includes Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Robert Heinecken, a counterpart working at the same time in Los Angeles.

In his words, Thomas Barrow wants to “move from the transparent, window-on-the-world form that has been photography’s primary reason for being since its invention, to making it a physical object, an object to be looked at for its own presence and not for a surrogate experience”. A cerebral innovator and iconoclast, Barrow is a predecessor to numerous contemporary artists currently pushing photography beyond its limits.

Barrow had a mid-career retrospective at LACMA and SFMoMA in 1986. His works are included in numerous public collections including Nelson Atkins Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art.