Architectural Photographer Wayne Thom and the Late-Modern Past
Daniel Paul spoke with architectural photographer Wayne Thom for Metropolis Magazine on the occasion of his exhibition After Modernism: Through the Lens of Wayne of Thom at USC Pacific Asia Museum.
After Modernism focuses upon Thom’s Southern California work primarily between 1968 and 1988 with a few later photographs and images from jaunts up-state, across the West, to Canada and across the Pacific Rim. Born in Shanghai in 1933, Thom was raised in Hong Kong and China, and by age 15 had transformed a family bathroom into his darkroom. In 1950 his family moved to Vancouver, and for a few fun-focused years after high school, Thom served as a ski instructor at Alberta’s Banff resorts, taking pictures all the while. In the mid-1960s Thom moved to Southern California to study photography, attending Santa Barbara’s Brooks Institute on account of its hands-on, highly technical focus. Architect A. Quincy Jones gave Thom the break that launched his career in 1968, the same year he graduated.
After Modernism devotes galleries to Thom’s typologies, some more specific than others. These include interiors and exteriors of office buildings, especially skyscrapers: a Thom specialty; educational and other institutional architecture; aerospace and data facilities already lost without a trace; and smaller scale Modernist mutations of Shed Style, Organic, and Regionalist influences. Another section features Late-Modern Orange County: a then-new microcosm of the larger region’s multinucleated, non-directional sprawl.