Tod Papageorge

This publication comprises two books of pictures Papageorge made after moving to Manhattan as a young man. As different as they are from one another—each book advances a distinct argument supporting Papageorge’s belief in photographic “fiction-making”—together they amount to a comprehensive portrait of an uneasy city during a grim, fevered time.

Down to the City follows (and ironically twists) the first sentences of Plato’s Republic, threading phrases from Socrates’ description of a religious festival through a stream of pictures seized in Manhattan’s secular streets. This novel-like flow builds the sense of a place haunted by dystopian disorder, which is amplified late in the book when the war in Vietnam takes center stage, clarifying the tensions leading to that moment.

The Dear Common Round traces a softer arc. Here the actions and exchanges that a city’s people make in the streets thousands of times a day are photographically honored simply and directly, as if the style of picture-making, at least initially in the book, had reverted to the first days of hand-camera photography. This changes as the sequence progresses, but for all its increasing visual and narrative complexity, The Dear Common Round holds true to the promise of its opening: this is a city sweet, if serious, at its heart, built to belong to and cherish.

Tod Papageorge was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1940, and began photographing during his last semester of college before graduating with a degree in English literature in 1962. His work has been widely exhibited and is represented in over 30 major public collections. Steidl has published Papageorge’s Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park (2007) and Dr. Blankman’s New York (2018).

Tod Papageorge (born 1940) started photographing intensely in New York’s Central Park in the late 1970s and continued working there until he moved from the city in the early 1990s. More than ten years later, he edited these pictures into a book which, in its marriage of the sensual and poetic, evokes the prelapsarian Eden suggested by its title.
This reissue of Passing Through Eden duplicates the first 2007 edition in its entirety, including Papageorge’s thoughtful essay on the evolution of his photography and its basis in his early attempts to write poetry. His essay further describes how the first half of the book follows the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, from the Creation through the (metaphorical) generations that follow Cain, suggesting how, even in the heart of a modern city, we might find echoes of elemental Biblical tales being acted out around us by those drawn into the park and its promise of beauty and peace. This section of Passing Through Eden then leads to a run of pictures confirming that the human comedy is equally alive and well in the park, even as its landscape—delightful and wild—retakes center stage to end the book.

Tod Papageorge (born 1940) produced the photographs for Dr. Blankman’s New York in 1966–67, on the heels of moving into the city. Photographer friends persuaded him that he could help pay the rent by landing some magazine assignments, and that a carousel tray of slides would be the best way of convincing art directors to take a chance on him. So, often after spending a day in the streets photographing in black and white, he would put a roll of Kodachrome film in his camera on his walk home and make color pictures, in many cases of shop windows.
This reissue of Dr. Blankman’s New York, first published by Steidl in 2017, has enlarged the size of the plates and, with one exception, condensed the original design to a series of double spreads, intensifying the sense that what Papageorge was doing in these photographs was elaborating, on a parallel track, the portrayal of Manhattan presented in the black-and-white work of Down to the City, the first volume of his War and Peace in New York (also published by Steidl).