Public Profile

TOM ZIMBEROFF, is a classically-trained clarinetist (USC School of Performing Arts) who nevertheless began a career as a photojournalist covering the Rock music scene. Subsequently, he turned his attention to other topics and, for twenty-six years, traveled throughout the world on assignment for many popular magazines as a member of the Sygma photo agency and, later, Gamma-Liaison. His images of celebrities, scholars, artists, scientists, business leaders, and politicians, including two sitting American Presidents, were published regularly worldwide, including covers for Time, Fortune, Money, People, and other periodicals. Later, as an accomplished commercial photographer, his work was featured in the annual reports and advertising campaigns of many Fortune 500 companies.
Zimberoff is known for his portraiture, with examples collected by the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Performing Arts Library & Museum, the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel-Aviv, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, among other institutions. His first two subjects were Marx and Lennon — Groucho and John, that is.
Zimberoff is an authority on the topic of applied business administration in commercial photography. He is the author of "Photography: Focus on Profit" (Allworth Press), the first college textbook about the business side of photography. He has also contributed articles to the leading photo-industry trade journals. Zimberoff also created PhotoByte®, the leading business-management software application for commercial photographers. 
Zimberoff was born in Los Angeles in 1951. He was raised there and in Las Vegas, Nevada. “Portrait photography,” he says, “is a predatory sport. I stalk my prey like a big-game hunter, look for a good clean shot, and try to avoid unnecessary wounds. I hang their heads on a wall to admire like trophies.”
After a ten-year-long hiatus from shooting pictures to pursue other business interests, Zimberoff picked up his cameras once again to illustrate his best-selling two-volume work entitled "Art of the Chopper" (Bulfinch Press) as a tribute to his decades-long affinity for custom motorcycles. He has most recently curated several exhibitions of the motorcycles featured in his books along with his portraits and documentary photographs of the artists who created them. Installations include the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, the Appleton Museum of Art, and the Kansas City Museum at Union Station.
Zimberoff lives in San Francisco, California.