“I think that part of what these pictures are about is the difference between our preconceptions of a place and what, when we get there, that place turns out to be.”
– Tod Papageorge, at the beach
Looking at Tod Papageorge’s photographs of Los Angeles beachgoers in the 1970s and 1980s is to go on a poetic escape. Between 1975 and 1988, Papageorge took his medium-format camera from New York City to LA four times. Did he get noticed walking about the beach with a big camera? “Even on the nude beaches, I was out there in my street clothes, looking like an idiot,” he says.
This was the same camera Brassaï had used to photograph in Paris night clubs, in the 1930s and 1940s. Papageorge had used it to show us the inside New York nightclub Studio 54
“In both cases, I just would stand still and pretend I didn’t exist, and eventually people seemed to accept the fact that I didn’t exist, that I’d somehow spontaneously combusted.. I would wait and wait until what I felt was a singular moment, only one moment, just one chance to lift the camera in a single gesture and make a single exposure.”
– Tod Papageorge
“I guess in your imagination you see four or five people wandering around, where in reality it’s piles, crowds of people moving around, so it’s much more enticing, engaging, exciting, because it is so complex.”
– Tod Papageorge
“When you lift the camera to make the picture, that’s something of a ‘bang, bang, boom!’—at least for the photographer.”
– Tod Papgeorge, who sees musicality in photography
“I think that part of what these pictures are about is the difference between our preconceptions of a place and what, when we get there, that place turns out to be. To describe a subject and, at the same time, reinvent it, is a double intention on the part of the photographer that we should be used to by now when we look at photographs. With these pictures, I worked with the belief that the closer I came to describing the literal nature of the place and people I was photographing, the more surprising the pictures might be, all while transforming the casual, unselfconscious physicality of these beachgoers into resonant form and meaning.”
– Tod Papageorge
Tod Papageorge: At the Beach is at MoCA WestportMuseum of Contemporary Art Connecticut through October 26th.
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