Peter Tomka Presents Double Player

Artbook and TBW Books are proud to present Double Player, an unconventional photographic book form by Peter Tomka that demands to be experienced by two people. This work unfolds and folds back into itself—a Möbius loop of imagery, or perhaps an ouroboros: an endless cycle of visual connections shared in real time between both viewers.

Loosely inspired by the structure of a deck of playing cards, Double Player weaves together five distinct bodies of work—Bachelor Suite (2024), Heatwave Suite (2024), Watering Hole (2023), Three Works (2021), and Paternity Test (2021)—shuffled into a whole that reveals surprising connections and throughlines. The book strikingly opens with the word GAYLORD—in another context, the name of a legendary Los Angeles apartment complex, but here, a directive that sets the tone and calls the viewer to engage immediately with the ensuing images.

The photographs are either created by the artist in a performative manner or appropriated from cinema, television, and pop culture, past and present. The circulation and repetition of motifs invite collaboration and reflection, emphasizing the act of shared viewing as part of the work’s meaning. The book collides ( both literally and metaphorically) at the halfway point, designed to be exactly the same from front to back—revealing no beginning or end, but rather an infinite loop that can be entered from any point.

Double Player is published on the occasion of Peter Tomka’s inclusion in Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, and marks the artist’s first monograph.

Peter Tomka was born in 1989 in Des Moines. Tomka is a photographer and the founder of the artist-run program No Moon LA. By manipulating rigorous technical and material processes, Tomka creates large-scale—partial, blurred, cropped, and grainy—photographs that are queer in form and content. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Webber Gallery, Paris (2024); O-Town House, Los Angeles (2024); the Fulcrum Press, Los Angeles (2023); and No Moon LA, Los Angeles (2021). Recent group exhibitions include O-Town House, Los Angles (2024, 2023); Galerie Wood, Los Angeles (2024); Webber Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); and Giovanni’s Room, Los Angeles (2023). Performances include L.A. Dance Project (2019) and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2018). Tomka earned a BA at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (2011), and an MFA at the University of California, Riverside (2020).

Arpad Kovacs is associate photo curator at The Getty. exhibitions have focused on 20th-century and contemporary photography, with a specific interest in conceptual practices and time-based media. A graduate of Queen's University and York University, Arpad arrived at the Getty Museum's Department of Photographs in 2011. He organized the monographic exhibitions Hiroshi Sugimoto: Past Tense (2014), Werner Herzog: Hearsay of the Soul (2014), and Richard Learoyd: In the Studio (2016), Tacita Dean (2022), Uta Barth: Peripheral Vision (2022). His thematic shows include In Focus: Play (2014), In Focus: Animalia (2015), Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media (2016), Mapping Space: Recent Acquisitions in Focus (2019), Encore: Reenactment in Contemporary Photography (2019), and In Focus: Platinum Photographs (2020). He is currently working on an exhibition titled “Every minute is history”: Five views of Los Angeles (2026) that will bring together works by five Chicano/a photographers working in Los Angeles during the second half of the twentieth century. He is also co-organizing a survey of the German photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg that will open at the Getty in early 2027.

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