Tom Fecht was born in Germany and lives in Berlin and Brittany (France), where he has his studio, at the Atlantic coast.
He studied cybernetics, thermodynamics and engineering at Columbia University in New York and art history at Technische Universität in Berlin. In the 1970s, he founded his own gallery and publishing company Elefanten Press in Berlin. Over the next two decades, Fecht worked as a gallerist, publisher, author and editor focusing on historic, artistic and documentary photography. In the late 1990s, he embraced photography as his preferred medium. Today he builds his own image machines, and has become known for his night photography and monochrome seascapes that focus on natural phenomena hidden in time and invisible to the naked eye.