Tom Atwood (born 1971) is an American fine art, portrait, and celebrity photographer, best known for his 2005 book ''Kings in Their Castles''. ''The New Yorker'' has praised the "refreshing clarity and modesty" of his work.

Early life

Born and raised in

Vermont Vermont () is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Massachusetts to the south, New Hampshire to the east, New York (state), New York to the west, and the Provinces and territories of Ca ...

, Atwood is a graduate of

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

, where he studied

economics Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...

. He later earned an

MPhil A Master of Philosophy (MPhil or PhM; Latin ' or ') is a postgraduate degree. The name of the degree is most often abbreviated MPhil (or, at times, as PhM in other countries). MPhil are awarded to postgraduate students after completing at least ...

from

Cambridge University The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

. Atwood has lived in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

, and currently resides in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

. Atwood worked several years as an advertising executive before turning full-time to commercial and fine art photography. As a photographer, Atwood is largely self-taught, developing many of his techniques through trial and error. According to Atwood, various cultural influences—including theater, painting, architecture, and psychology—have informed his photographic style. Atwood is particularly known for combining and balancing the genres of

portrait A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face is always predominant. In arts, a portrait may be represented as half body and even full body. If the subject in full body better r ...

ure and

architectural photography Architectural photography is the subgenre of the photography discipline where the primary emphasis is made to capturing photographs of buildings and similar architectural structures that are both aesthetically pleasing and accurate in terms of re ...

, so that neither the subject nor his or her surroundings predominate in the final image. Memorable early portraits include astronaut

Buzz Aldrin Buzz Aldrin ( ; born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr.; January 20, 1930) is an American former astronaut, engineer and fighter pilot. He made three extravehicular activity, spacewalks as pilot of the 1966 Gemini 12 mission, and was the Lunar Module Eag ...

and actresses

Hilary Swank Hilary Ann Swank (born July 30, 1974) is an American actress and film producer. She first became known in 1992 for her role on the television series '' Camp Wilder'' and made her film debut with a minor role in ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' (19 ...

and

Julie Newmar Julie Newmar (born Julia Chalene Newmeyer; August 16, 1933) is an American actress, dancer, and singer known for a variety of stage, screen, and television roles. She is also a writer, lingerie designer, and real estate Business magnate, mogul. ...

. Atwood and his work have won many awards: in 2009 he was named Photographer of the Year at the Worldwide Photography Gala Awards, earning first place in the portraiture category.

''Kings in Their Castles''

Atwood was widely acclaimed for ''Kings in Their Castles'' (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), a collection of 71 photographs which featured gay urban American men, mainly New Yorkers, photographed in their domestic environments. Atwood worked for four years on the project, relying on word-of-mouth among New York friends to help find compelling subjects and to convince prominent cultural figures to participate. "I like photos chock-full of visual information," Atwood has said, adding that he prefers to capture individuals doing everyday activities and "in spaces that are built up over time, where everything has meaning to the person." Subjects included the playwright

Edward Albee Edward Franklin Albee III ( ; March 12, 1928 – September 16, 2016) was an American playwright known for works such as ''The Zoo Story'' (1958), ''The Sandbox (play), The Sandbox'' (1959), ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' (1962), ''A Delicat ...

, photographed in his New York City living room playing a miniature piano, filmmaker

John Waters John Samuel Waters Jr. (born April 22, 1946) is an American filmmaker, actor, writer, and artist. He rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films, including '' Multiple Maniacs'' (1970), '' Pink Flamingos'' (1972) and '' Fe ...

, photographed packing plastic food into a suitcase, fashion designer Todd Oldham in his Pennsylvania

treehouse A tree house, tree fort or treeshed, is a platform or building constructed around, next to or among the trunk or branches of one or more mature trees while above ground level. Tree houses can be used for recreation, work space, habitation, a ha ...

, and drag queen Mother Flawless Sabrina (Jack Doroshow) using

duct tape Duct tape or duck tape is cloth- or scrim-backed pressure-sensitive tape, often coated with polyethylene. A variety of constructions exist using different backings and adhesives, and the term "duct tape" has been genericized to refer to all o ...

to give herself a facelift. Artists Ross Bleckner, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt and Tobi Wong, choreographer

Tommy Tune Thomas James Tune (born February 28, 1939) is an American actor, dancer, singer, theatre director, producer, and choreographer. Over the course of his career, he has won ten Tony Awards, the National Medal of Arts, and a star on the Hollywood Wal ...

, creative director

Simon Doonan Simon Doonan (born 1952
Simon Doonan, ''< ...

, composers David del Tredici and

Ned Rorem Ned Miller Rorem (October 23, 1923 – November 18, 2022) was an American composer of contemporary classical music and a writer. Best known for his art songs, which number over 500, Rorem was considered the leading American of his time writing i ...

, club DJ

Junior Vasquez Junior Vasquez (born Donald Gregory Mattern; August 24, 1949) is an American DJ, record producer and remixer. He has been referred to as one of the only DJs of his time to gain international attention. Career Mattern moved to New York City a ...

, director

Joel Schumacher Joel T. Schumacher (; August 29, 1939 – June 22, 2020) was an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Raised in New York City by his mother, Schumacher graduated from Parsons School of Design and originally became a fashion designe ...

, drag queen

Hedda Lettuce Hedda Lettuce is the stage name of Steven Polito, an American drag queen, comedian and singer who lives and works in New York City. Polito debuted his character Hedda Lettuce in 1991 on the Manhattan Cable TV show ''The Brenda and Glennda Show''. ...

(Steven Polito), U.S. Representative

Sean Patrick Maloney Sean Patrick Maloney (born July 30, 1966) is an American attorney and politician who served as the U.S. ambassador to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development from 2024 to 2025. He served as the U.S. representative from from ...

, and writers

John Ashbery John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic. Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...

Michael Cunningham Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel '' The Hours'', which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is Professor in th ...

Richard Howard Richard Joseph Howard (October 13, 1929 – March 31, 2022), adopted as Richard Joseph Orwitz, was an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and was a graduate of Columbia University, ...

Andrew Solomon Andrew Solomon (born October 30, 1963) is an American writer on politics, culture and psychology, who lives in New York City and London. He has written for ''The New York Times'', ''The New Yorker'', ''Artforum'', '' Travel and Leisure'', and oth ...

and

Edmund White Edmund Valentine White III (January 13, 1940 – June 3, 2025) was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. A pioneering figure in LGBTQ and especially gay literature after the Stonewall riots, he wrote with ra ...

also figure in the collection. Charles Kaiser contributed the book's introductory essay. "The art books I had seen about gay men were all nudes on the beach or romping through the forest," Atwood told ''The Los Angeles Times''. "I wanted this to be more about people as human beings, their idiosyncrasies, their daily lives."

''Kings & Queens in Their Castles''

Atwood's forthcoming book, ''Kings & Queens in Their Castles'', will be published in 2017 by art book publisher Damiani. Called "the most ambitious photo series ever" of LGBTQ subjects, the book expands on Atwood's earlier concept to include new portraits of some 160 lesbians and gay men, as well as members of the bisexual and transgender community, of whom about 60 are well-known figures. Lesser-known individuals include baristas, lawyers, and drag queens. Subjects were photographed in 30 different U.S. states.

Exhibition history

*''"Personal"'',

Louis Stern Fine Arts Louis Stern Fine Arts is an art gallery located at 9002 Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, California, in the heart of the city’s Avenue of Art and Design. History and development Louis Stern Fine Arts was founded in 1988 by Louis Stern, a s ...

, Advertising Photographers of America, Los Angeles, 2003 (group exhibition) *''"Boys of Summer"'', ClampArt, New York, 2003 (group) *"''Kings in Their Castles"'', Farmani Gallery, Los Angeles, 2006 *''"There's No Place Like Home"'', PDNB Gallery, Dallas, 2008 (group) *''L.E.A.D. Uganda'', Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, 2009 (group) *''The Fence at Photoville'', Photo Daily News, Brooklyn, 2012 (group) *''Art Takes Times Square'', New York, 2012 (group) *''3rd Ward Exhibition'', New York, 2012 (residency) In addition, Atwood's work has been exhibited at the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

in New York City, the

Museum of Photographic Arts The Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA) is a museum in Balboa Park in San Diego San Diego ( , ) is a city on the Pacific coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, ...

, the Center for Fine Art Photography, the

Pacific Design Center The Pacific Design Center, or PDC, is a multi-use facility for the design community in West Hollywood, California. One of the buildings is often described as the ''Blue Whale'' because of its large size relative to surrounding buildings and its ...

, the

Directors Guild of America The Directors Guild of America (DGA) is an entertainment guild that represents the interests of Film director, film and Television director, television directors in the United States motion picture industry and abroad. Founded as the Screen Dir ...

, and the

George Eastman Museum The George Eastman Museum, also referred to as George Eastman House and the International Museum of Photography and Film, is a photography museum in Rochester, New York. Opened to the public in 1949, is the oldest museum dedicated to photography ...

Publications

References

External links

Tom Atwood Photography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Atwood, Tom 1971 births Living people Alumni of the University of Cambridge Harvard College alumni American LGBTQ photographers Photographers from Vermont Photographers from New York (state) 20th-century American photographers 21st-century American photographers