Tom Finke "Footprint in Time"

Tom Finke, along with his wife, Mami Yamamoto, resides in a quaint home, cluttered with decades worth of art from various adventures, in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado.

The walls of his home are filled with photographic prints and paintings from artists of varying stages of fame.

“I started collecting in the seventies,” Finke said. “Fortunately or unfortunately, my collection has extended further than just photos.”

Coffee tables and counters are heavily decorated with miniature statues, wooden figures and other miscellaneous objects from diverse cultures. Despite the complexities of a number of his collections, each one represents the deep love one man can have for the arts.

“We’re to the point now that if we see something we like we just get it,” Finke said. “Although we’ve also gotten to the point where we just have so much stuff.”

Since he was a boy, Finke has been surrounded by the arts. His father, Thomas Finke, was said to have always had a camera in his hands, and, because of that, so did his son.

Sadly, Finke’s father died in 2022 at the age of 96. However, he is remembered fondly by his surviving family as an avid fisherman, businessman and family man.

“My father passed away last July,” Finke said. “He was a big fisherman. I’m trying to decide how to deal with it, but I’ve got his tackle box and I’ve got all these lures from the thirties and forties that I could do something with. They’re beautiful and one of a kind.”

Aside from his hobbies as a photographer and fisherman, Finke’s father was a partial owner of the Finke Company, a non-food wholesale business and the father company to Pharm-O-Spot.

“I worked there through high school and a few years when I was in college,” Finke said. “But working for your family is really difficult. They were just set in their ways.”

Although Finke loved and respected his family and the business, there was an adventurous spark within him. He needed to explore.

“I wanted to go to the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid,” Finke said. “So I asked for time off and they said no, so I quit. They told me I couldn’t quit, and I just said, ‘I quit. I’m going to Lake Placid’ then I got in the car, drove to Lake Placid, and went to the Olympics.”

Finke arrived at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid with no documentation that could prove he belonged there. Not even a ticket.

“I didn’t have a pass and I didn’t have any tickets,” Finke said. “But I was really good at slingin’ bullshit.”

Weighed down by his photography equipment, Finke approached the area designated for photographers and media workers. Immediately he was asked to show his pass. Finke made a show of frantically patting down his pockets, swearing and eventually failing to find his pass. Fooled by his acting skills, the guard allowed him through.

“I actually went to the U.S.A. [v.s.] Russia hockey game where they won gold,” Finke said. “I also got to see the gold medal for figure skating and I went to the ski jump[ing]. I just lied.”

It was not long before Finke began making friends, establishing himself as a professional photojournalist in the eyes of the staff watching over the media personnel.

“Finally, the same people got to know me and they didn’t even ask when I walked by,” Finke said. “I also met a photojournalist from Montreal. She told me if there was ever an issue to say I was her assistant.”

Tom Finke

One scandalous trip to the 1980 Winter Olympics sparked a lifetime of adventurous desire and serves as one of the first great stories in Finke’s photographic career.

Finke possesses an innate talent for finding the unique artistic beauty in even the most mundane of subjects through the lens of a camera. Much of his personal photographic work focuses on the average and the unnoticed, a photographic theme he discovered and pursued since he fully realized his passion for photography as an undergraduate student.

“Where I went to undergrad, you were required to take humanities and art classes,” Finke said. “I took a painting class. It was horrible. I took a jewelry class and I did really well, so I took a couple other jewelry classes. But then I took a photography class, and it was just one of those ‘aha’ moments. I just felt a connection.”

For the most part, Finke’s work consists of candid street photography. He wanders through bustling city streets with a simple film camera slung around his neck, shooting photos of passersby in their natural environment. His street photography freezes seemingly insignificant moments in time, allowing viewers to realize the otherwise unrecognizable beauty of any given moment.

“I still shoot on the street a lot, and that’s something I’ve been doing since undergrad,” Finke said.

After decades of shooting street photography, Finke had accumulated an expansive stock of photos. Within his workspace are dozens of boxes filled with photos taken in a variety of cities in the United States and Japan. The only problem was finding a way to share them with the world.

“Robert Frank, [Joesef] Koudelka and [Garry] Winogrand, for the kind of work I do, were like heroes,” Finke said. “And when I was in Paris, one of the things [Koudelka] said was if I wanted to get my work seen, make a book. At first, I was confused. Then, I realized a

Koudelka print is around twenty-five thousand dollars – I can’t afford that – but I can afford a forty-dollar book and get to see fifty Koudelka prints.”

After taking some time to consider other potential options, Finke decided to pull the trigger and get the ball rolling on his first photo book.

“[Making a book] ain’t cheap,” Finke said. “Just the paper to make the prints was seventeen hundred dollars. Then they had to be taken to Japan and sequenced and then of course you have to pay the designer and all of these details. But it was definitely worth it. They came out really good.”

“Japan: Footprints in Time 1997-2010” was published in 2015. It features a collection of Finke’s best street photos in Japan taken over a nearly thirty-year span. Within the same year, Finke published his second photo book, “America: Footprints in Time 1982-2012” which, much like his previous publication, exhibited his best photos from his work on American streets.

“Mami was really good with making things really minimal,” Finke said. “The numbers on the pages are really small and stuff. She also did the translation so it’s both in Japanese and English, which is really nice.”

Finke loved the final product of his first two books and fully intends to begin the process of creating another.

“I want to do one on the spaces between the houses [in Japan],” Finke said. “I feel like that work is pretty much finished at this point.”

Finke’s “Spaces Between” project continues to follow the theme of finding beauty in the common, repetitive things in life. Only this time, his focus was not on the average person, but the repetitive places.

“Japanese houses are not far apart,” Finke said. “I could reach out and touch my neighbor’s house from my own house. But, they decorate those spaces between the houses, and sometimes stuff just falls in between them.”

As he spoke, Finke drew stacks of prints out of cardboard boxes. They depicted the between-spaces that he spoke of. Some photos showed lights and other decorations strung across the space, others showed clothes hanging out to dry or toys that had been left behind. His work somehow captured a glimpse of the residents’ personalities in only five feet of space.

Despite Finke’s overwhelming surplus of quality prints, he is always focused on new ideas and the next project.

“Currently, I’m working on a series of photographs called ‘Silent Places’ which have no people in them, but you would expect – you know – it’s Tokyo, you would expect people to be everywhere. I feel like that’s interesting.”

However, it seems that one project at a time is not enough for the experienced photographer. Finke often cycles through mini-obsessions with particular styles and settings for his shots, constantly challenging himself to come up with new ideas and testing the limits of his capabilities as a photographer and artist.

“For me, there’s something about shooting at night that I really like,” Finke said. “And it’s safe [in Japan]. I’ll go out at two o’clock in the morning and nobody will bother me. It’s not something I would do here.”

Finke’s passion for the arts – specifically photography – has led him down many interesting roads in life. It has also allowed him to combine the pursuit of his true calling as an educator with his long-time passion for photography.

“I’ve always been a soccer coach,” Finke said. “That’s kind of like teaching, and I love to teach. I really, really love to teach, and I minored in art in college. I knew I didn’t paint very well, but then I thought of photography. So, I went back [to school] and got my MFA from the University of Cincinnati, and then I enrolled at Arizona State for my PhD in education because I knew I wanted to teach.”

Finke has lived this dream since 1979 when he began teaching college-level photography classes. He is currently a professor at Red Rocks Community College in the Denver area. However, Finke was not always dead set on becoming a professor of the arts.

Initially, Finke began his post-secondary education career as a pre-medical student, studying the science of the human body. But he soon realized that medicine and healthcare was not the career path for him.

“I backed off and ended up getting a degree in biology,” Finke said. “So then I went to graduate school and got my advanced degree in, basically, biochemistry. After that, I worked as a research scientist for a while working with Peregrine Falcons. You know when the DDT was making the eggshells really thin? We were working on that when the government cut funding.”

Around the same time that the funding for his research was cut, he was approached by the United States Military. He was offered an opportunity to continue working as a research scientist. Certain that joining the military was not the right choice, Finke made the decision to return to school to become an educator.

Although by the time he enrolled in graduate school Finke knew that photography and education were his purpose, he still felt a connection with many other forms of art.

“Where I went to graduate school, you had to major in two things,” Finke said. “I majored in photography and ceramics, which are two very different arts. [Photography] is really clean, and in ceramics you can get as dirty as you want.”

Despite his passion for his work, Finke found himself frustrated and burnt out with the relatively stagnant process that is film photography. Fortunately, the contrast between the day to day of photography and ceramic art was enough to rejuvenate him whenever his frustration grew. Finke found balance between the overbearing cleanliness of the darkroom and the chaos of the ceramics lab.

“In the darkroom there’s no dust, you can’t sneeze, you don’t bring anything to eat or drink or anything like that,” Finke said. “So when I used to get tired of it, I would go to the ceramics lab and throw, and I would just get absolutely filthy. It was a great way to decompress.”

Finke continues to find balance in many aspects of his life, now using his work in the dark room as his way to decompress from the stress of educating the next generation of photographers like him. Finke’s art has inspired and impressed many, but, at the end of the day, he knows he became an artist for one reason.

“I make [art] for me,” Finke said. “And if you like it, fine, and if you don’t, I don't really care.”

Story by Nathan Feller & Photography by Rylan Bruns