A young man with long hair carrying a surfboard towards the waves. Bikini girl laughing on a blanket. Children digging shallow water. A cluster of bodies sunbathing on the sand.
With the blockade of the coronavirus pandemic, renowned photographer Todd Pappe George expects to revisit these images of the beaches of Los Angeles taken on several trips to California between 1975 and 1981. Provided time outside. ..
Now, the series of work is Exhibited at Danjiger Gallery It was exhibited for the first time in Los Angeles.
“It was a little disappointing to think of those pictures sitting as negatives in a yellow box,” 82-year-old Papageorge said in an interview from his home in New Haven. “It’s a great pleasure to have people see them now and get them to react.”
At the exhibition “The Beaches,” which will be held until August 31, 20 images were magnified into two sizes (24 inches wide and 56 inches wide), all taken with a medium format camera. Dealer James Danziger, who also has a reservation gallery in New York, said it makes sense to showcase this series of works in the city where they were created.
“Especially strong in these pictures is this feeling of life, the sun and California,” said Danjiger. “These are the people who went to the beach from Venice to Malibu in the late 70’s and early 80’s.”
Winner of two Guggenheim scholarships and collected by more than 30 major institutions, Papagerge reminded me of the excitement of visiting California for the first time in 1975 and using the 35mm camera extensively. “I knew I was using a machine that could record the beauty of light incredibly,” he said. “Camera can represent some kind of brilliance that I was very interested in, and even trying to achieve with those pictures.” “Light is a very powerful component,” he said. Added.
A complete set of Los Angeles beach photos has just been acquired by the New Orleans Museum of Art.
This is the second show with Danjiger’s Papageorge. The gallerist introduced a series of tourists of photographers in the Acropolis, Greece, taken in the 1980s. Shows, shows, plays, “About the AcropolisWas acquired by Phillips Academy’s Addison American Art Gallery after opening in New York in March 2020 and in Los Angeles in 2021.
These photos resonate with the beach photos, Papageorge said. “It’s a kind of arena of cosmic congestion, beauty and body that I think works the same,” he said. “Tourists — they are young in very simple clothes and go against the beauty of the Greek temple.”
his Image of Studio 54 There is a similar aspect in the late 1970s. “It’s not everyday life, it’s a kind of extreme situation,” he said.
In Papageorge’s photo, his subject is looking away, but he said it was intentional. He wanted them to “look unaware of me.”
“As you can see from classical paintings, creating a sense of the world of photography that seems to unfold as you study photography, unaffected by the presence of an obstructive photographer’s shaper,” he said. Told. “Many beach photography has been enhanced by the visual complexity. This is the kind of density I’ve always wanted to pursue in my work from the very beginning.”
Papageorge also looked back on his work in the late 1960s, investigating the psychological impact of the Vietnam War and everyday life on the streets. As a result, two volumes, “War and Peace in New York: Photo 1966-1971”, published by Steidl in November, were completed. Most of the photos contained therein have not been published before.
Despite capturing the turbulent history chapters, the images are timeless. Ken Johnson reviews photos of Vietnam in the 2009 New York Times I have written This project was a diagonally critical study of “a wide range of Americans who did not revolutionize in the 1960s, the” silent majority “who did nothing unusual during the war. The absence of hippies, ippies and other dissidents is part of the reason for making his series a thought-provoking time capsule. “
Papageorge has taken the time to expand its options over the last few years. “When I first moved to New York in the mid-1960s as a 25-year-old man, of course I was able to return to my early work at 35mm, which was at the height of the Vietnam War. And sex, drugs and rock’n’roll,” Papageerge said. Said. “It’s hard for people to know how much it’s being charged. We’re living in a similar era today.
“People will see some similarities between those photographs, especially the world depicted in war books, and the stress, division and polarization that culture feels today. increase.”
Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1940, Papageorge studied English literature at the University of New Hampshire. There he was serious about writing poetry, but he was frustrated. “I was motivated,” he recalled. “I wanted to be the next John Keets. Every word was painful.”
In his last semester, 1962, he decided to take a photography class, which changed everything. In particular, the photographs found by photographer Henri Cartier Bresson in the library. “It was a conversion experience,” he said. “I searched for hours and found two more. By the end of the night, I thought,” I want to be a photographer. ” I saw it in Cartier-Bresson’s picture because it was a true poem that did not rely on this pain of trying to put together words. “
In the next few years, Papageorge discovered the scorching personal work of Robert Frank and Walker Evans. He lived in Boston, San Francisco, and New York, where he met a photographer. Garry Winogrand, Became one of his best friends. He also met Frank and Diane Arbus.
In the 1960s, John Szarkowski, cinematographer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, worked to bring photography into the form of art. (Papageorge has been on display in the museum since 1971.)
“He was hanging the show and writing a text that really revolutionized everything,” Papageorge recalled.
The photographer, also represented by the German gallery Thomas Zander, has obtained works from institutions such as MoMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the French National Library.
He has published seven books, including “Passing Through Eden: Photos of Central Park” (2007) and “Tod Papageorge: Dr. Blankman’s New York” (2018). 1960s.
“I was able to see in photos what I had never seen before. He took the genre of street photography to a new level,” said in front of the Pace-MacGill gallery, which has worked closely with Papageorge. President Peter MacGill said. “Details will be displayed. You will see the nuances of facts, events and gestures. He will choose the right moment to release the shutter.”
Papageorge has influenced generations of aspiring photographers as director of the Yale MFA Photography Program from 1979 to 2013. About 30 of his students have been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, he said.
“He’s really underwater,” said Awol Elizk, a photographer who studied under Papagerge. “It wasn’t just about looking at the pictures to improve the quality of the pictures, it was always beyond the images themselves.”
The photographer said he was easy to teach because of his background as an English major.
“The frame of my photo has always been poetry,” he said. “When I talked about photography, I had this kind of built-in analogy maker. It’s poetry and poetry and poetry, opening up students to the poetic potential that photography has. did.”
Papageorge continues his new job. Staying at the Roman Academy American Academy in 2009, he started an ongoing project to shoot the Italian city in digital color. “There’s still a lot to do,” he said.
Soon, with a show in Los Angeles and his upcoming book, Papageorge is delighted and proud to revisit the past. “I’m looking at the work I made when I was young and I think it’s an old man, but I don’t really feel that way,” he said. “This allowed us to put these series of tasks under retroactive surveillance that we think they are getting.”
“The work was created with a rush of love and life,” he added. “I didn’t have the opportunity to rethink it, or I could consider the whole thing.”
Beach
Until August 31st, Danziger Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA, 310-962-0002; info@danzigergallery.com.
