Long-haired young men carrying surfboards to the waves; girls in bikinis hanging on blankets; children dig in the shallows; clusters of bodies bask on the sand.
The coronavirus pandemic gave prominent photographer Tod Papageorge an unexpected amount of time to revisit these images of Los Angeles beaches, taken on several trips to California between 1975 and 1981. He had never taken a break to organize them .
Now that oeuvre is on display at the Danziger Gallery in Los Angeles, the first time they were exhibited.
“Seeing those photos as negatives in yellow boxes was a little disheartening,” Papageorge, 82, said in an interview from his home in New Haven. “It’s a great joy that people are seeing and responding to them now.”
“The Beaches,” the exhibit of the work that runs through August 31, features 20 images enlarged to two sizes — about 24 inches wide, about 56 inches wide — all shot with medium-sized cameras. Dealer James Danziger, who also has a gallery by appointment in New York, said it made sense to show this body of work in the city where it was made.
“What’s particularly strong about these photos is the feeling you get of life and the sun and California,” Danziger said. “These are the people who went to the beaches from Venice to Malibu in the late 70’s and early 80’s.”
Papageorge – the winner of two Guggenheim grants and whose work has been collected by more than 30 major institutions – recalled the excitement of his first trip to California in 1975, the first time he extensively used a medium format camera. “I knew I was using a machine that could capture the beauty of light astonishingly,” he said. “The camera can describe a kind of look that I was very interested in – even obsessed with – that I was trying to achieve in those photos.” He added: “The light is a very, very powerful part.”
A complete set of Los Angeles’ beach photos has just been acquired by the New Orleans Museum of Art.
It is Danziger’s second show with Papageorge; the gallery owner showed the photographer’s series of tourists on the Acropolis in Greece, made in the 1980s. The show, “On the Acropolis”, opened in New York in March 2020 and then Los Angeles in 2021, before being acquired by the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy.
Those photos resonate with the beach photos, Papageorge said. “It’s kind of an arena of congestion and beauty and bodies in space that I think works in a similar way,” he said. “The tourists – they are dressed very simply and young, set against the beauty of the Greek temples.”
To be images from Studio 54 in the late 1970s have a similar aspect. “It’s not everyday life, it’s kind of an extreme situation,” he said, “the revelers, the revelers.”
In Papageorge’s photos, his subjects look away, which he says is intentional; he wanted them “to seem so oblivious to me.”
“To create the feeling – as we know it from classical painting – that the worlds of the photographs seem to unfold as we study them, not distorted by the presence of an intrusive photographer-former,” he said. “A feeling that is enhanced in many of the beach photos by their visual complexity, a kind of density that I wanted to emulate in my work from the beginning of shooting.”
Papageorge also looked back on his work in the late 1960s, which explored the psychological effects of the Vietnam War, as well as everyday life on the city streets. The result is a two-part “War and Peace in New York: Photographs 1966-1971,” which will be out of Steidl in November. Most of the photos included in it have not been previously published.
The images have a timelessness to them, although they also capture a tumultuous chapter in history. Review of the Vietnam Photos for The New York Times in 2009, Ken Johnson wrote that the project was “an obliquely critical study of that broad swath of Americans who didn’t revolutionize in the 1960s, the ‘silent majority’ who did nothing special during the war. The absence of hippies, yippies and other dissidents is part of what makes his series a thought-provoking time capsule.”
Papageorge has taken the time to expand the range in recent years. “It allowed me to go back to the very early 35-millimeter work I did when I first moved to New York as a 25-year-old man in the mid-1960s, which was of course at the height of the Vietnam War. and sex and drugs and rock and roll,” Papageorge said. “It’s hard for people to know how fraught that was. We are experiencing a similar period today.
“I think people will see some sort of parallel between the worlds described in those pictures, especially the war books, and today — the kind of stress that the culture is feeling right now, the division and polarization.”
Born in Portsmouth, NH, in 1940, Papageorge studied English literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he was serious about — but frustrated with — writing poetry. “I had lofty ambitions,” he recalls. “I wanted to be the next John Keats. Every word was torment.”
During his last semester, in 1962, he decided to take a photography course and that changed everything, especially a photo he came across in the library of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. “It was a conversion experience,” he said. “I searched and searched for hours and found two more. Towards the end of that night I thought, ‘I want to be a photographer.’ Because what I saw in those Cartier-Bresson photos was real poetry that didn’t rely on this torment to put words together.”
In the years that followed, Papageorge discovered the torrid personal work of Robert Frank and Walker Evans. He lived in Boston, San Francisco and then New York where he met the photographer Garry Winogrand, who became one of his best friends. He also met Frank and Diane Arbus.
In the 1960s, John Szarkowski, the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, was instrumental in elevating photography to an art form. (Papageorge has been on display at the museum since 1971.)
“He put up shows and wrote lyrics that really revolutionized everything,” recalls Papageorge.
The photographer, who is also represented by Galerie Thomas Zander in Germany, has had his work acquired by the MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, among others.
He has published seven books, including “Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park” (2007) and “Tod Papageorge: Dr. Blankman’s New York” (2018), detailing the two years he shot in color in the late 1960s in New York.
“We would see things in the photos that we’d never seen before — he took the genre of street photography to a new level,” said Peter MacGill, the former president of Pace-MacGill Gallery, who has worked closely with Papageorge. “You would see details. You would see facts and events, the nuance of a gesture. He would pick the right moment to release the shutter.”
Papageorge influenced generations of aspiring photographers as director of the Yale MFA photography program from 1979 to 2013; about 30 of his students became Guggenheim Fellows, he said.
“It really goes below the surface,” said the photographic artist Awol Erizku, who studied with Papageorge. “It was never just looking at photography for photographic qualities, it was always something beyond the image itself.”
Teaching was easy for him, the photographer said, because of his background as an English major.
“My framework for photography was and has always been poetry,” he said. “I had such a built-in analogy maker when I talked about photographs, which is poetry and poets and poems — opening students to the poetic possibilities that photography could have.”
Papageorge continues to create new work. His residency at the Rome Academy American Academy in 2009 kicked off an ongoing project where he photographed that Italian city in digital color. “There is still a lot to do,” he said.
Most immediately, with the Los Angeles show and its upcoming books, Papageorge takes pleasure and pride in revisiting the past. “I look at work I made as a young man and consider it an old man, although I don’t think of it that way,” he said. “This has allowed me to put those bodies under retrospective scrutiny that I think would benefit from it.”
“The work is made in the intoxication of love and life,” he added. “I never had a chance to reconsider it. Or even consider the whole thing.”
The beaches
Until August 31, Danziger Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, California, 310-962-0002; info@danzigergallery.com†