Anamorphs

“Rendered in soft gray and brown tones, his nude figures and portraits look deceptively like ink drawings. The simple, elegantly composed figures and forms don’t dazzle as art objects but make a statement about the changing relationships between photography and painting.
For most of the works on view, Mezzanotte has made contact prints on cotton rag paper treated with platinum emulsion. But he has taken the usual step of applying the light-sensitive emulsion in controlled brushstrokes, selecting the areas where he wishes a photograhic image to, in effect, “adhere”. As a result, his figures float like drawings or etchings on creamy paper grounds.”

-Camela Raymond "The Painting of Photography " The Portland Oregonian April 2000 pg. E5

“Thomas Mezzanotte, on the other hand, uncorks some mysterious photographic genii and pours them out onto paper like so many ghostly shadows. His process involves using a large format camera obscura (pinhole camera) and the hand application of a 19th century photographic emulsion: the result is a series of watercolor-like figures dancing on fields of white.
Mysterious and poetic at the same time, these images dance a fine line between drawing and photography. The viewer moves seamlessly between the calligraphic quality of drawing and the sudden, telling fo​cus of a mechanical lens. The effect is liquid: a figure swims up to the surface of the picture plane-a vague arabesque in a sea of white light-and suddenly certain particulars gel into somehow magical recognition."

​ -Patricia Rosoff "Real Painting, Really " The Hartford Advocate May 25, 2000 pg.33