Thomas' photography career has taken her from Florida to Texas to California to the Indonesian island of Bali. She has edited photos for newspapers, and now teaches photography to 9- to 15-year-old students just down the street from her San Mateo home.
After graduating from high school, Marianne Thomas studied journalism at Syracuse University and taught basketball with the Peace Corps in Venezuela
Camera gave woman focus
By Kimra McPherson
Mercury News
Marianne Thomas got her first camera, a plastic Kodak, at age 6.
``Through the years, I upgraded a little bit,'' said Thomas, now a professional photographer and recipient of one of the Peninsula Community Foundation's first artist residency grants.
Thomas' photography career has taken her from Florida to Texas to California to the Indonesian island of Bali. She has edited photos for newspapers, and now teaches photography to 9- to 15-year-old students just down the street from her San Mateo home.
Her ideas about helping preteens and teenagers explore the world through photography appealed to the Peninsula Community Foundation's grant committee, senior program officer Frank Lalle said.
``It's taking this technology that's very easy and approachable and developing a new kind of language for these kids,'' said Lalle, who initiated the artist residency program.
Thomas hadn't planned to make a career of photography. After graduating from high school, she studied journalism at Syracuse University and taught basketball with the Peace Corps in Venezuela. She then took a job as a writer at a small newspaper in Florida, occasionally taking photographs that were published in the paper.
Then the paper's one staff photographer left -- and Thomas' bosses asked her to step in full time.
She quickly realized she liked visual journalism better than writing.
She took some community college classes to get her associate's degree in photography and worked at newspapers in Florida and Texas before landing at the San Francisco Chronicle in the early 1990s. She worked as a photo editor there for 10 years before leaving in 2001 to pursue her own projects.
Since then, she has traveled twice to Bali, spending almost six months meeting and photographing Balinese women. Now, Thomas -- also a tango and salsa dancer -- is taking photos for a series about dancing.
Since leaving newspaper photography, her photos have started ``leaning toward the non-objective,'' she said.
``I'm still photographing in a documentary way, not setting anything up,'' she said. ``But what's coming out is much more amorphous.''
Also a watercolor painter, Thomas is interested in finding a way to combine painting and photography. In her recent work, she has explored documentary photography as an art form -- something that has not always been accepted by the broader art community.
``If one draws or paints or does watercolors of a person, no matter what shape or form that takes, it can be construed as art,'' Thomas said. ``When one takes a photograph of that kind of situation, there is less of a tendency to look at it as art. For many years, my inspiration has been to see where the tension is in documentary photography as an art form.''
But while her approach has changed during the years, her basic motivation has stayed the same.
``It's almost this compulsion to take pictures,'' she said.
Contact Kimra McPherson at kmcpherson@mercury news.com or (650) 688-7557.
