“As a photographic storyteller, Norm understands that each object reflects a personal history, a history that is unknown to the viewer but left to our imaginations.”
— Aline Smithson, Founder and Editor, Lenscratch, Fine Art Photography Daily
Norm Diamond retired in 2013 from a long career as an Interventional Radiologist and immediately began preparing for life as a fine art photographer. He studied with well-known teachers in many workshops and showed his work in portfolio reviews. As he delved into his photography, he realized that that he was drawn to themes of memory and loss. In 2017, his first photo book, What Is Left Behind — Stories From Estate Sales, was published by Daylight books. Shortly after he photographed what turned out to be the last six months of an old gym in downtown Dallas. Kehrer Verlag published Doug’s Gym in 2020.
Norm’s photography has been exhibited in many galleries and museums including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Center for Photographic Art, the Houston Center for Photography, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Center for Fine Art Photography, the Colorado Photographic Art Center, the Masur Museum of Art, and others. The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas acquired his images from the 50th Anniversary Commemorative of President Kennedy’s assassination. The New Yorker recently published two articles on estate sales using Norm’s photographs. Some of the other publications that have written about his work include Texas Monthly, the Dallas Morning News, The Guardian, New Republic, Lenscratch, L’Oeil de la Photographie, and FStop Magazine.
“Norm Diamond’s photographs capture the ordinary, sentimental, heartbreaking, and poignant nature of places, objects and individuals. In the same discerning manner he employed as an interventional radiologist, Diamond hones in on the small but significant details that represent the whole. Diamond’s pictures of Doug’s Gym are neither celebratory nor elegiac. They are objective, richly informative, visually captivating,
and very touching.”— Cathy Kimball, Executive Director, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art