Thomas Allen borrowed his first pulp novel. Permanently. And perhaps without its owner, his uncle, having exactly known it had been lent. Call it an artistic appropriation. Appropriation might best describe Allen’s series, Pulp. Named for the early 20th-century sensationalist fiction genre, Allen creates three-dimensional objects from pulp book cover illustrations, then photographs them.

Allen grew up in Redford, Michigan outside of Detroit. He abandoned his degree in criminal justice to pursue his passion, graduating with a BFA from Wayne State University, and eventually an MFA from the University of Minnesota. Many fellowships and residencies across the country followed before Allen returned to Michigan where he makes art and runs a small hobby farm with his wife.

As a kid, Allen was fascinated by dioramas and his toy Viewmaster, and he adored pop-up books. This fascination inspired his breakthrough photography project, Science: Fact or Fiction, which involved creating three-dimensional art by cutting illustrations, charts, and diagrams from old science textbooks and using them to animate and, in some cases, contest the ways of thinking represented by the books themselves. 

Pulp pushes Allen’s exploration of fact and fiction that began in his science textbook series. While the previous series examined how textbook illustrations convey empirical facts, Pulp dwells entirely in the realm of fiction in order to confront the stories we tell ourselves. Indeed, as Allen describes it, “My photography is about trying to tell a story. Take something that is not there and tell a story about it.” In the case of Pulp, Allen cuts imagery from pulp fiction covers and crafts a story that may or may not exist in the source text. As Allen points out, the cover was not bound by the fictional text, often depicting scenes that never actually occur in the novels. Illustrators were not required to read the books they drew for. Instead, they might be given a set of ideas or general plot from which they would illustrate covers that would attract the eyes of readers. 

Allen's photographs similarly are not bound by the cover illustrations of these books. His are new stories, reassembling old images and text to convey new narratives. In doing so, they replicate the process we all engage in when we appropriate, reshape, and retell our family histories, our cultural narratives, and our personal stories that make us who we are.

The lack of text in Allen’s series obfuscates the story. We don't know, in most cases, what books Allen remade and photographed. We do, however, immediately imagine a narrative to fill that absence. In “Polecats,” for example, we see an erotic pole dancer being watched by two men, and we become voyeurs of a voyeuristic moment. In “Sugar,” the focal point is a man’s hand dropping a sugar cube into a cup of coffee while, in the background, blurred and ambiguous, a woman clutches her stomach. In both images, we have lost all grounding from text, so we craft our own story. Whether Allen’s photograph actually reflects the source text is ultimately irrelevant. The core idea is that we have been invited into a new configuration of that source story, and crucially, that we go willingly, without a moment’s hesitation. 

“Unbridled” takes this idea even further. Blank space dominates the image, and we are anchored only by a lone cowboy walking with a rifle in a barren landscape. We recognize the isolation immediately, if also the assertiveness of the figure on a desert-like ground. The story here is almost entirely ours to make.

Pulp demonstrates Allen’s beautiful visual story-telling, but his skill lies in the way that he has made us a participant without our having realized it. As our imaginations start to complete the story he began, we unwittingly illustrate the point Allen seems to be making: No matter how certain we may be that we own our stories, we are in fact ourselves assemblers and collage-makers of so many other moments and lives around us. Any claim toward objective reality through story is, at best, a fiction we have created to give ourselves meaning. And for Allen, this is a celebration of humanity and our capacity to make meaning. 

This article first appeared in The Fiction Issue.