YOUNG AMERICAN
2018
Excerpt from 284 portraits

Excerpt from a press release by curator Thomas Beachdel, PhD.

Marie Tomanova’s Young American does not directly problematize what it means to be an American today, but celebrates the freedom and identity of the idea of an “America” still rife with dreams and possibilities, hope and freedom. Her images, direct and without artifice, confront us with the power and beauty of people simply being, the young...just being. And in this just being is the essence of unity, love, and acceptance.
It is a visualization of an America in which individuality is valued as uniqueness and not judged as lack of sameness. It is work that reverberates with the distant echo of August Sander’s Face of our Time, Malick Sidibé’s exuberant youth of Mali, or, perhaps more closely, with Nan Goldin’s intimacy.