ALAN THOMAS is a publisher and photographer in Chicago. He is editorial director at the University of Chicago Press, where for more than 30 years he has published books in literature, criticism, cultural studies, and other areas of the humanities. He has edited many books in visual studies for the Press, including history and theory of photography, and several books by contemporary photographers. For more information, visit his University of Chicago Press profile and this "Meet the Editor" interview.

Thomas's photographic work alternates between landscape and portraiture to explore themes of place, habitation, and historical change. He exhibited most recently at the Process Gallery at Indiana University, Bloomington (2023); in Lens2020 (2020) at Perspective Gallery in Evanston, IL; and in Go Down Moses (2019) at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. In 2012, his one-person show at the Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Kolkata, India, surveyed photographs made over two decades in Chicago, Tokyo, and Kolkata. He has also exhibited at Catherine Edelman Gallery and the Illinois State Museum in Chicago; the Flak Photo Midwest Print Show in Madison, WI; Photo Works Gallery in Glen Echo, MD; and other venues. Thomas is a contributor to the online journals Design Observer and Places, which published his photographic series Chicago Self Park (2010), Open Secrets: Photographs of Japan (2010), The Blue Corvette (2011), Approaching Calcutta (2013), and Signs, Signs (on the January 2017 Women's March in Chicago), as well as essays on Lee Friedlander's Mirrors, Terry Evans's Heartland, and Laura McPhee's Calcutta. He served as a portfolio reviewer at New Orleans's PhotoNOLA (2018) and Houston's FotoFest (2024), and as juror of the Texas Photographic Society's Portfolio Project (2024).

Thomas's book, 55x5, with an introduction by Kathryn Lofton, was published by Marquand Editions in 2018. Photographs from 55x5 also appeared in Poetry magazine and Design Observer. His most recent publications are an excerpt from Approaching Calcutta in the Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) project at Indiana University (2022) and a selection of photographs from a new project on Bolinas, CA, in the inaugural issue of the literary journal Revel (2024). 

Thomas was raised in Germany, Yugoslavia, and Virginia. He received his B.A. from Princeton University, where he studied photography with Emmet Gowin and Frederick Sommer, and an M.Phil. in modern English literature from the University of Oxford.

(Photo by Ted C. Fishman)