Tod Papageorge - "On The Acropolis"
April 8 - May 27, 2021
Curated by Noah Baumbach
Last March I opened our show of Tod Papageorge’s “Acropolis” photographs at the gallery in New York. A week later the show and gallery closed to the public following the outbreak of COVID. In spite of this, the exhibition was widely followed on the web and among the people who bought pictures from the show was film director Noah Baumbach whose films I have always admired. So when I decided to re-open the show this spring in L.A. I asked Noah if he would curate the show which he readily agreed to. His curation involved a re-editing of the selection and a sequencing of the images as he would see them laid out. In Baumbach’s words, “Tod’s beautiful sunburnt photos are an incredible document of a time and a place but also a hilarious and incisive commentary on how we are all tourists at some point in our lives. These people become both invaders of the Acropolis and also a subject all their own.”
The show is now scheduled to open at Danziger at Fetterman in Los Angeles on April 8th.
One of the most notable photographers of our time, Papageorge is known for both the originality and quality of his work as well as his influence on the generation of students he mentored while the Director of the Yale MFA photography program from 1979 to 2013.
An early participant in the seminal American school of street photography practiced by his contemporaries and friends Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Joel Meyerowitz, Papageorge’s path through photography has taken him from the streets of New York to the capitals of Europe, from black and white to color, from small to mid-sized cameras, but always towards describing in his work an increasing clarity and luminosity. Central to this project (if not his life) is the question of what makes a photograph extraordinary, even as he uses nothing more than direct observation of our common, physical world in his efforts to trace on film a revelatory or transcendent moment.