Tod Papageorge

(Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1940 - )

North America, American

The dynamic aesthetic of 1970s black and white street photography owes much to the work of Tod Papageorge, whose influence was extended through his teaching position in Yale University’s graduate photography department from 1979 to 2012. (The Guggenheim Foundation awarded fellowships to 33 of the artist’s former students.) Introduced to photography in his final semester of college, Papageorge earned a BA in English from the University of New Hampshire in 1962. He moved to New York City three years later, where he met Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank. With their 35mm cameras in hand, Winogrand and Papageorge would walk the city streets together, sometimes accompanied by Joel Meyerowitz or Paul McDonough. In 1970, when popular opinion against the Vietnam War was at its height, Papageorge received a Guggenheim grant to document sporting events across the country. He began photographing Central Park with a medium format camera in 1977, a project he continued until leaving New York in 1993. Papageorge’s curatorial projects include Public Relations, an exhibition of photographs by Winogrand exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1977, and Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence, at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1982. His work is in over 30 major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

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