A native New Yorker, Thorney Lieberman has enjoyed a
distinguished career photographing architecture. Fortunate to
have worked with many major architects in New York and across
the country, he was the principal photographer for I.M. Pei &
Partners. A beautiful book of his landscape photographs of New
York City - Manhattan Lightscape (Abbeville Press 1990) - capped his New York career and is still in print.

Living in Colorado in the 1990’s, Lieberman developed a
specialized technique for producing life-size photographic
images and applied it in a series of full-length portraits of Native
Americans in ceremonial regalia. That collection was exhibited
at the Museum of World Culture in Frankfort Germany and the
Rockwell Museum of Western Art in Corning NY before being
donated to the respective tribal museums and cultural centers.

 

In 2005 the Lieberman’s moved back East -- to Charleston, West
Virginia, where his wife was born and raised. Intrigued to find
himself in the midst of “coal country,” Lieberman set about
exploring. These adventures resulted in 18 life-size photographic portraits of coal miners, often with their children. This body of work received a warm welcome, including from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, including a Merit Award and the Governor’s D. Gene Jordon Memorial award in 2007 for two of the portraits, and a full exhibit at the Culture Center in the State Capitol Complex in 2009.

Thorney has had a number of works exhibited in galleries
and museums in both the U.S. and Europe, including a major
retrospective outlining his “Several Arguments with Photography” at the Huntington (WV) Museum of Art in 2008 as part of their Walter Gropius Master Artists series. He’s taught architectural photography at the Parsons School of Design in New York, as well as basic photography in private workshops. Blessed with three grown children and three (very soon to be five) grandchildren, Lieberman and his wife Anne live in Charleston, not far from the Capitol, where he continues to photograph architecture and pursue his own projects to honor and promote his new home state of West Virginia.