Tom Laurence has spent one career as a clinical neurologist with a deep-seated interest in how the human nervous system works with photons to create light. He grew up in a neighborhood near the Detroit Institute of Arts and began making photographs after seeing a Cartier-Bresson show at Cranbrook when he was ten. He worked his way through medical school processing electron microscope plates and printing them for an artist and melanoma researcher Yutaka Mishima, developing what would become a life-long interest in forming shapes on paper. For the next three decades he produced drawings and experimented with splashed ink while continuing to create photographic still lifes.

In 2001 he attended a copper plate intaglio workshop taught by Larry Hamlin who had been a Master Printer at Crown Point Press for ten years. While learning the basics of aquatint and drypoint Tom knew he was destined to use photography to put ink on paper.

Ten years later he discovered that the printers at Cone Editions Press were developing direct-to-plate polymer photogravure which led to spending a week at CEP as artist in residence and returning there for second and third residencies in 2022 and 2023. Over those three years he developed a close collaboration with master printers Walker Blackwell and Nathanael Kooperkamp, and together they fine-tuned a workflow for a series of prints based on images Tom had captured during two five day shoots at Auschwitz Birkenau.

In 2024 he rejoined Walker and Nathanael at Prints on Paper where he was able to plunge deeper into working on polymer plates with etching needle, blowtorch, scattered human hair and ashes.

His work has been shown over the past three years in four group exhibitions curated by Zsolt Bátori and Borbála Jász at the Ph21gallery in Budapest, as well as in The Art of Handmade Photography group show curated by Dale Rio at the Vermont Center for Photography.

At the moment he is continuing to experiment with direct to plate mark-making, developing new equivalents of aquatint, spit bite and soft ground methods for the polymer process.

His content continues to abstract nightmare, evil and classical mythology.