The eye sees more than the heart knows. William Blake
I read this line as a freshman in college. It appealed to an earnest youth whose vision far exceeded what he could then understand or reconcile. Later as a photographer I found elements in my work that I had not known existed while I made them. I was compelled to admit that there was another mind at work beside my conscious one, one a lot better, one with poise, acuity and authority. Perhaps this is what Jung meant by the "collective unconscious?" I went with it. Now after living through the decades of my visual experience I will venture to approach the paradox in Blake's "simple" sentence. We live, at the very least, a dual existence: the life and receptivity we inherit from our long cellular and animal history and that of our relatively immature and experimental life as humans. Our sight, its root millions of years old, is non-verbal, non-rational and non-conceptual. It presents the primordial in all its silence, complexity and simultaneity. Our heart must grow to meet the challenge of what we see in all its starkness and grandeur - a challenge Blake seems to posit is never fully met - yet in that deficit the promise of the future awaits. |
Tom Rozakis is a native New Yorker and attended public schools there. He studied Biology at Columbia College and English at St. John's University where he received his B.A. His love of the outdoors and talent for trigonometry turned a chance encounter with land surveying into a thirty-five year career controlling some of the largest construction projects in New York City. He happily worked with architects and engineers and side by side with carpenters, iron workers, masons, plumbers and electricians. Tom contributed to the cutting edge of computer programming as it entered his field but was saddened to see the triangle go the way of the horseshoe. He is a committed liberal democrat and trade unionist who insists on the dignity of work. His father was a common laborer who fought the forces of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin in the guerilla actions of WWII in the Spartan peninsular. His grandmother survived Ottoman genocide escaping Turkey in an open boat.
In 1982 he looked through the ground glass of a twin tens reflex camera and soon after bought a Rolleiflex and tripod. This would be his favored camera for the next twenty-five years. Self taught in chemistry and large format techniques he built his own black and white darkroom and began showing his work. Beginning in libraries and local arts councils, then wineries, private and public galleries his work was recognized in Popular Photography, the New York Times and the Suffolk Times. In April 2000 he had a solo show at the Oysterpond's Historical Society Schoolhouse in Orient, NY.
As he moved from straight "f64 school" to toned prints he became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of the silver gelatin expression of the negative. Fortuitously he viewed an historic show of Chinese calligraphy and ink painting and realized the power of ink and paper and has since worked to use intaglio printmaking as a means to express photographic information. At that point he began focusing more on printmaking and won honors at the Parrish Art Museum 1999 Open Competition and the East End Arts Council 2001 Print Show.
After his retirement in 2016 he began showing his work again, at the Alex Ferrone Gallery in Cutchogue, NY, the fotofoto Gallery in Huntington, NY and with the Rockaway Alliance of Artists in Queens. He has taken up working in graphite, ink, and watercolor as well.
In April 2020 his 95 year old father succumbed to covid-19 in a Florida nursing home. In his anger and grief Tom wrote a 5000 word family history. Then he began writing poetry for the first time and recently won Honorable Mention in the 2021 Nassau County Poet Laureate Society Competition. He has also started writing short auto-biographical essays of his days as a NYC motorcycle messenger, taxi-driver and land surveyor, crossing paths with the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Diane Keaton, Richard Nixon and the Good Housekeeping Gingerbread House.