Bio:
Photographer Tom Chambers was raised in the Amish farm country of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Tom completed a B.F.A. in 1985 from The Ringling School of Art, Sarasota, Florida majoring in graphic design with an emphasis in photography. Since 1998 Tom has exhibited photomontage images from ten photographic series both nationally and internationally in twenty one solo exhibitions and over seventy group exhibitions and art fairs.

Tom has received fellowships from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.  Tom’s photography is held in the collections of the National Museum of Photography, Bogotá, Colombia; California Sate Polytechnic University; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; Santa Fe Museum of Art, NM; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Bangkok, Thailand; Texas Photographic Society; City of Jacksonville, FL - Art in Public Places; University of Texas; Sir Richard Branson, personal collection; and the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.  Tom’s work has been published in multiple publications and books. "Entropic Kingdom", containing images from five series, was published by Modernbook Editions in 2012.  Galerie Vevais published "Werkdruck No. 6" in 2015 featuring his Illumination series.  A retrospective book, Hearts and Bones, was released in the Fall of 2018, by Unicorn Publishing, London.

My Process:
I initially sketch a concept or idea which I have for an image. Then, I photograph each piece of the photomontage using a Nikon D800. The greatest challenge is in making sure the light intensity and direction are similar in each of these shots. The process of creating a photomontage may take a month or more, depending upon how quickly I am able to get all the shots and sort through them, selecting the ones which work best together. "Pieces" of the final image may include the landscape or background, often shot in sections, as well as the sky, a human figure, an animal, or another object. I use Photoshop software to combine each "piece", thus creating the final image. Lastly, the photomontage is printed with archival pigment inks on cotton rag paper.