For our online exhibition this month we are pleased to present a selection of 20 of our favorite images from “Passing Through Eden” along with a dozen unpublished photographs from the series that have never been shown before.
Tod started photographing in New York’s Central Park starting in 1970 and continued shooting there until he moved away from the city in the early 1990s. More than ten years later, he edited these pictures into a book which, in its marriage of the sensual and poetic, evokes the unspoiled Eden suggested by its title.
When describing this body of work John Szarkowski said “When Tod Papageorge began this work, the newspapers saw Central Park, chiefly as a sight of danger and outrage, and they were doubtless partly right. But the park shown here seems no more dangerous than life itself, and no less filled with beauty, charming incident, excess, jokes in questionable taste, unintended consequence, and pathos, truly described. One might say that no artist has done so much for this piece of land since Fredric Law Olmstead.”
In Papageorge’s essay in the book, he connects the evolution of his photography to his early attempts to write poetry. He further describes how the first half of the book follows the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, from the Creation through the (metaphorical) generations that follow Cain, suggesting how, even in the heart of a modern city, we might find echoes of elemental Biblical tales being acted out by those drawn into the park and its promise of beauty and peace.
Central to Tod’s art, if not his life, is the question of what makes a photograph extraordinary. Using both small and mid-sized cameras he directly and sensitively observes the physical world in his efforts to trace a revelatory moment. Papageorge’s Central Park photographs are poetic demonstrations of this photographic interrogation, weaving the landscape and visitors together in ways that are sensual, narrative, and unmistakably photographic.
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