"Finding a place where worlds merge": Interview with Marie Tomanova

Marie Tomanova, "First Roll, Frame 24," 2017. 

By EMMA FIONA JONES, July 7, 2025

I first encountered Marie Tomanova’s work among the avalanche of orphaned images that characterized the early-2010s internet. At that time, her photography—at least the images that made their way to my painstakingly curated Tumblr feed, my teenage pride and joy—took the form of deadpan flash-lit portraits on New York rooftops or in cramped apartments, her subjects staring lucidly back at the viewer, often in a state of effortlessly glamorous undress, made up in the most fantastical sense of the term if wearing makeup at all. I began filing them away alongside Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas, and Corinne Day’s dreamy snapshots of Sofia Coppola’s Lisbon sisters, constructing a tenuous utopia strung across scraggly roadside terrain and the mythic ugliness of New York streets. The question that began to slowly take shape in my mind, although I couldn’t yet articulate it, was: What significance, what collective power, does femininity hold, once liberated from its inverse?

That’s not to say that Tomanova’s work is strictly feminine, by any means. In fact, her projects typically destabilize constructions of gender, from her early portraits created in the years spent building a home for herself in New York in exile from her hometown of Mikulov, Czech Republic—culminating in the book and exhibition Young American—to her recent self portraits in drag, Untitled Portraits. And yet her practice is anything but individualistic, constituting an ecology of encounter rather than a string of disconnected Is. She doesn’t take or capture something from her subjects (a term she has reservations about), but rather, creates something new that hovers ambivalently in the space between her gaze and the other’s.

The image that most vividly cemented itself in my mind depicts two lovers in a bathtub, one coiled around the other, their soft gazes ensnaring the viewer’s glance. The photograph, created in 2017, instantly garnered global attention—as with any iconic image, for reasons that evade logic or language. As Tomanova explains in our conversation below, the photograph is from a roll of film shot in the afternoon that she first met Kate Vitamin (with whom she has since developed a longitudinal portraiture of sorts) and her then-partner, Odie, in their New York apartment.

In her recently published book, Kate, For You, Tomanova unfurls the roll of film from beginning to end. The composition(s), both of the individual images and the 36-exposure roll in its entirety, creates a closed circuit between Kate, Odie, and Marie—not for the sake of excluding the viewer, but rather, calling on them to act as witness rather than voyeur. The book opens with a foreword by renowned Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková and introduction by art historian Thomas Beachdel, a close collaborator across numerous books and exhibitions.

Following the launch of Kate, For You—and ahead of the U.S. release of Marie Dvořáková's documentary tracing Marie's artistic evolution, World Between Us—I sat down with Marie and Thomas to discuss the (re)construction of identity through images, ideas of home, and the relationship between art and writing.

 Marie Tomanova, "Cornelia (Self-portrait)," 2024.

Emma Fiona Jones: I’ve heard that you hate the word “muse,” and you also avoid using the term “subjects.” How would you describe your relationship with the people you photograph, and with Kate specifically?

Marie Tomanova: It’s complicated, because those are the words that I use the most often to talk about my photography. I don’t like what the word “muse” carries with it—old masters portraying women. But at the same time, I haven’t yet found another word that doesn’t have those cultural issues attached to it.

The same goes with “subject”: It detaches the people I photograph from the creative process. For me, photography is a lot about collaborating with the people in front of the camera, and for that, I really feel that the word “subject” is not describing their full role in the creative process.

Thomas Beachdel: We actually curated a show in 2017 at the Czech Center called Muse Muse. The idea of that show was to call into question that idea of “muse,” and to dispel the myth of the “puppet master.” The title was a way of upsetting this power dynamic of the “great artist” and the muse.

[For instance,] Manet’s “muse” was this woman by the name of Victorine Meurent. Nobody knows her, but everybody knows Manet. She was in all of these paintings—when you talk about Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, when you talk about Olympia, that’s her!

What I try to say is, “you make pictures with somebody,” which is really what you do, [Marie]. I never say that you take pictures either—that feels like you’re robbing them.

That’s what’s so nice about Kate, For You. Marie has worked with Kate since 2017. It has evolved into longitudinal portraiture, and it’s been a collaborative process the whole way through.

Marie Tomanova, "Kate (Mirror)," 2019.

 EFJ: Depicting queer femme relationships is always a double-edged sword—articulating their beauty and depth, but also opening them up to objectification. The images of Kate and Odie so gracefully elude the male gaze in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on. How do you grapple with this tension between visibility and vulnerability?

MT: For me, photography is a means to connect with people. It’s not about getting a certain picture that I have in mind; we make it together.

In that first shoot with Kate and Odie, Kate was comfortable in front of the camera—she’s a model—and Odie was less comfortable at first. But what I love is that you can see Kate tending to Odie, making sure they’re comfortable. That comes through in the pictures. You can see them become more at ease across the roll of film.

I didn’t come there with the intention of “capturing” their relationship at all; the pictures in the bathtub happened organically. I felt so lucky that they invited me into their world.

EFJ: What was it like returning to these images all these years later? How has your relationship with the images—and your relationship with Kate—evolved?

MT: I felt from the beginning that there was a certain importance to these images, but it was only over time that I realized how important. I selected that one photo at first, and didn’t show many of the others. But I kept coming back to it over the years, and my relationship to the pictures changed and deepened.

Kate and I have been friends ever since, and I’ve continued photographing her. It has turned into long-term portraiture, which gives it more weight over time. If you know the people in your pictures, then there’s all the more emotion connected to the images, because you’re building something together.

 Marie Tomanova, "Untitled (Self-portrait)," 2016.

EFJ: Something about your images reminds me of performance art documentation, such as Ana Mendieta’s photographs of her private performances. Images can feel revealing, exploitative; looking at your work, however, I get the sense that you’re giving us only a sliver of a sequence. The photograph is almost secondary.

MT: I’m definitely inspired by Ana Mendieta. I did a series of self portraits in nature, where I tried to be one with nature, just feeling the nature on my body. I lived in New York City by that time, but I grew up in the small town of Mikulov in the Czech Republic—in vineyards and fields, climbing trees. There was a period of eight years where I couldn’t leave New York because of my immigration status, and I think the self portraits came from this longing for home; all of a sudden, I felt like being in nature was the only way I could connect back to home and my roots.

But for the self portraits to work for me, they had to be nude, because I didn’t want to have additional layers to hide behind. I also wanted to literally feel the moss, feel the tree, against my skin.

I love the process of taking photographs. The experience of it is the most important part to me.

TB: Some of those works are in her solo exhibition I LOVE SEEING YOU at Her Clique in Lisbon right now. But part of the reason they haven’t been shown extensively is Marie’s concern with the question of the male gaze, as you brought up.

EFJ: You’ve said that what made you become a photographer was the Francesca Woodman show that you saw with Thomas at the Guggenheim in 2012, but that what inspired you most was her journals.

MT: I don’t think that Francesca Woodman show would have struck me so powerfully if not for the journals. I’ve been journaling since I was a teenager. I studied painting in the Czech Republic, but after I got my MFA, I quit painting. I came to the U.S.—originally as an au pair in North Carolina—and started searching for some other outlet of expressing myself. That’s when I got really into writing. Everything was so new. For a moment, I felt like I fell apart into little pieces, and I had to put myself back together, in the way that I actually wanted to be.

When I saw Francesca Woodman’s show, I loved the photographs, but I would never have felt like, “I can do it too,” if it was just the photographs. It was this feeling of relating to her journal writing, which in a sense felt like my writing. That’s what made me connect with her work so strongly, and realize that I want to try photography.

Marie Tomanova, "Gracie," 2020.

EFJ: I’m curious what the relationship between image and text is for you, Thomas. You’ve written essays for all four of Marie’s books. Are you describing the work? Interpreting it? Is it a collaboration? How do you see the relationship between your writing and her photographs?

TB: What I tried to do in the series of essays in Young American, New York New York, It Was Once My Universe, and Kate, For You is to contextualize and interpret the body of work, and draw out certain important things that might otherwise not get spoken about.

It’s also about relating it to her earlier work. For example, Young American is really about Marie seeing herself in the social landscape of the United States, and trying to belong and connect. At the same time, it was also a way to project an image of what she hoped America would look like—

MT: —and then Trump got elected—

TB: —and it was very devastating.

MT: I was terrified to travel.

TB: And her antidote was taking pictures of these people who were inspirational to her. But at the same time, she’s taking pictures of herself in nature. For me, it was interesting that her work was about feeling a part of the social environment that she documents in Young American, while at the same time, merging with the natural environment—both series, in a way, are self portraits. So I thought that that had to be written about.

It matters when the work is shown in different contexts, too. We did a show at the Czech Center in 2018 of the images from Young American projected large-scale. A lot of the kids [who were in the photographs] came, and it was a very powerful moment—an affirmation, a beautiful way of showing that they matter.

Then in 2019, we took that same work to a monastery in Olomouc, Czech Republic, [for the Academia Film Olomouc festival,] and projected the work—all of these pictures of diverse and queer youth—onto this Jesuit structure. There was this 800-foot-long corridor, and it kind of curved, and when you walked in the door, it was this small thing, and it was huge by the time you got to the end.

TB: But then the sad part is, it’s temporary. The Jesuit architecture is still standing; meanwhile, the kids are no longer there.

That moment had to be talked about in the context of the work—and the only place to do it, really, was in the book.

So that’s where my work comes in—contextualization. All of that richness is right there, but just looking at the photograph, you don’t necessarily get all of that right away.

Marie Tomanova, "Way to School," 2018.

 EFJ: Much of your work addresses the concept of home in different ways. Is that something you consciously think about while you’re making work?

MT: I’ve always loved taking portraits of people in their spaces, because it tells you so much about them—since my first years in New York, photographing people in their apartments, on their rooftops.

At the same time, I was longing to go home to Mikulov. I spent eight years taking the same route to school every day; I know the way I walk, I know how it smells in the spring, I know how it smells in the winter. And the one thing you cannot move with you is the place. Mikulov is the home that I was born into, and it will forever be home; New York is the home that I built for myself.

I think that the idea of home goes through all of my work, like you said, very strongly—whether it’s other people’s homes or my home.

TB: A couple of years ago, Marie participated in this artist residency in her hometown, "Dílna” [Mikulov Art Symposium].

MT: Which for me was like coming full circle.

TB: She had realized after she returned to New York after going to Mikulov for the first time in eight years—the trip that resulted in It Was Once My Universe—that the one thing that was almost entirely missing from those photographs was her mother.

MT: And I had really returned because of my mom. But she hates being photographed, so I’ve had to take time to build that kind of relationship with her, to be able to photograph her.

TB: Which brings us to Dílna. She took pictures of her mother each day, and then installed them in a castle, which inherently carries this idea of family heritage. Marie and her mom each chose pictures, and they were set on opposite walls, as a way to communicate with each other. That project was called World Between Us.

MT: So I now have a lot of pictures of my mom, and I’m the only one who’s allowed to photograph her.

TB: It’s interesting—you went home again, and you managed to establish, or reestablish, a connection with your mother through photography.

MT: Those pictures were the world between me and my mom, but then the title, World Between Us, was taken for the documentary that just came out, which totally makes sense: It’s the world between me and Thomas, between me and the director, between us and you—the viewers. It’s about finding a place where worlds merge. WM

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Marie Tomanova, from "World Between Us," 2024.