Enduring Justice - Tapa dura

Armed with a camera, Thomas Roma spent fourteen months in the corridors of the Brooklyn Criminal Court Building, documenting lives transformed by the workings of the law. Arriving early, he would see the hallways filling with victims, defendants, and trial witnesses; with families, girlfriends, and boyfriends; with lawyers, translators, and undercover cops. In the confines of this oppressive atmosphere, fraught with accusation and judgment, Roma made evocative and empathetic portraits of these people as they awaited the fall of a gavel.
What we notice is not just the slow passing of time, as the accused and their accusers trudge through the isolating bureaucracy of the U.S. judicial system, but more importantly the time Roma spent interacting with his subjects, hearing their stories, and photographing them with a remarkable insight into their states of being in this much despised no-man's land.

As Norman Mailer writes in a short foreword, "justice comes to long dead hours sitting around," as the beleaguered visages and tired bodies here readily attest. As Robert Coles, Harvard social ethicist and presidential Medal of Freedom winner, puts it in an introduction, these photos show "the struggle of various Americans to find themselves, to get a grip on their emotional moorings, to steer clear of all sorts of perplexing and scary legal imperatives as they descend upon one's eyes, ears, thoughts, anticipations, expectations, amidst a series of events that have their own momentum, logic, prompt their own requirements, madness, obligations." That sentence's complexities perfectly reflect those of the photographs.

Thomas Roma, two-time recipient of Guggenheim Fellowships, has exhibited internationally, had one-man shows at The Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal. The Director of Photography at Columbia University, author of Come Sunday, Found in Brooklyn, Sunset Park, and Higher Ground, and founding contributing photographer to DoubleTake, Roma lives in Brooklyn with his wife Anna and son Giancarlo.