These voyeuristic photos use a glory hole as an aperture

Few artists have explored the parallels between the sex party darkroom and the photographic darkroom quite as literally as Peter Tomka. Projecting digital negatives through glory holes onto light-sensitive paper, which he then develops in his bathroom, the Los Angeles-based artist pushes the photographic medium through a series of translated states, forged through a unique process that reimagines and queers our understanding of the “home studio”. 

In Bachelor Suite, now on view at Webber Gallery in London’s Fitzrovia, a series of ten unique silver gelatin prints, each comprised of four panels, suggest fragmentary scenes, half-forgotten memories, and small details of obscure significance. Tomka works with both original and found photography and film stills sourced from a vast archive of thousands of images, depicting friends, lovers, celebrities, public statues, press images and self-portraiture. Manipulated through an experimental entanglement of digital and analogue processes, the hazy black and white prints have a Magic Eye quality: legible a few paces away, but dissolving into a matrix of pixelation as the eye moves closer. 

Among a number of plausible narrative arcs, Bachelor Suite proposes an account of loss, renewal, and tentative intimacy, with Los Angeles as a complicated third protagonist. A bottle of poppers against the backdrop of a lover’s prone body; a crumpled aircraft on railway tracks; sculptor Nína Sæmundsson seeking the gaze of her clay Prometheus, the sink of Lee Miller’s darkroom – in Tomka’s tight crop, a print lays face down in the developing tray, its content concealed and its significance latent.  

I cut a glory hole in my studio wall and that somehow released the tension I was feeling in the space. Plus, people could now peer inside – Peter Tomka

This emphasis on the contexts and means of production is key to Tomka’s labour-intensive process. Selected images from his archive are often heavily cropped, before being converted into digital negatives which are then exposed using a makeshift enlarger constructed from the artist’s own bed, the aperture a “glory hole” cut into the mattress. “I originally had cut a hole in my studio wall at grad school to release a tension that I felt in my studio. My friend and I used to work at raves where we would set up the darkroom, and there would be these panels that we would cut glory holes into with a hole saw drill bit. So when I was like, I want to cut a hole in my studio wall, my friend said ‘Oh, just take the glory hole bit’,” he recalls. “And so I cut a glory hole in my studio wall and that somehow released the tension I was feeling in the space. Plus, people could now peer inside.”

It was later that Tomka began to experiment with using the glory hole as an aperture through which to project digital images onto light-sensitive paper, cutting through walls, panel boards and finally his mattress. The glory hole now occupies both a technical and a ritualistic role in his practice: “It does come from a ritual positioning because it's now part of the recipe, an ingredient; just part of the checklist for the way in which I figured out my process. It sits between the practical and the mystical.”

The title, Bachelor Suite, refers to the typology of the studio apartment that Tomka lives and works in at the Gaylord Apartments in Koreatown, Los Angeles, an iconic building founded a century ago as one of LA’s first co-ops. It remains a refuge for a pluralist cross-section of low-income LA life, its rent-controlled units housing artists, families, service workers and an art gallery. Tomka’s small unit affords space for little more than the essentials and so the furniture must modulate into darkroom equipment. “Bringing my studio into my home came in some way from a practical necessity,” reflects Tomka, “but it was also part of my commitment to being an artist. The way that I could show this full commitment was to literally give up my domestic space, give up my bed.” 

It is also undoubtedly romantic; the artist’s bed - the site of sleep, dreams, and sex - becomes the apparatus of artistic production and a workshop where meaning is made. The bedroom is the most private space in the home, and the bed is its most intimate element – a vessel for bodies, oftentimes the place of both birth and death. Dominic Bell, director of Webber Gallery, says, “The idea of the images being projected through the place where he sleeps is beautiful. You really think about the light travelling through the projector, through the head of the mattress, and onto the surface of the paper.”

Shaped by the intimate architecture of the home, and merging domestic interiority into artistic practice, Bachelor Suite is inseparable from, and indeed in dialogue with, the circumstances of its creation. It proposes a new grammar for articulating the relationship of the digital image to the physical photograph, the relationship of the archive to the unique art object, and the relationship of the body to the creative act. “I do want to reference the process as much as I obfuscate it,” says Tomka on his uniquely embodied approach. “If I’m going to make work, I need to be all in.”

Bachelor Suite is running at Webber Gallery, London, until the 28 March, 2025.