![\"tp1.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.foto8.com\/live\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/tp1.jpg?resize=470%2C370&ssl=1\" "\\"tp1.jpg\\"")
Passing through Eden<\/em> is his most sustained and comprehensive project to date \u2013 a photographic study conducted over a quarter century period (from 1966-1992) of the habitu\u00e9s of New York\u2019s Central Park. A selection of photographs from the work is on show at the Michael Hoppen Gallery (until April 12); and more than one hundred images from the series are compiled in the Steidl publication of the same name.<\/p>\n
The Park has no doubt changed over the decades, but not as much as the fashions. Big hair, big lapels, tie-dying, Lycra, trench coats, headbands, rollerblades \u2013 come and go. All the while New Yorkers use the space to flirt and caress, or to grab lunch and fall sleep, or – more often – to hang out and kill time.<\/p>\n
Papageorge\u2019s achievement is to make of this shifting playground – of fleeting gestures and glances – pictures that impose coherence on the free flowing park life in which he immersed himself. His is the ability to isolate the momentary and the transient to reveal the extraordinary and the overlooked<\/p>\n
![\"tp5.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.foto8.com\/live\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/tp5.jpg?resize=470%2C316&ssl=1\" "\\"tp5.jpg\\"")
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At the V&A Papageorge spoke of the intense, nervous concentration he experienced while photographing an adult combing a child\u2019s hair \u2013 waiting for the precise and briefest instant when the comb would be most clearly positioned against the boy\u2019s head. The same exactitude and awareness determine the success of a photograph from 1991 in which woman glances momentarily at a bouncing ball. But despite the pictures\u2019 dependence on the acutest attention to precision and timing \u201cthe end result\u201d, he observed, \u201clooks totally natural\u2026and yet that\u2019s not it at all\u201d.<\/p>\n
He had begun walking the streets with a Leica and 50mm lens (\u201cthe gospel according to Henri\u201d) but by the early 1970\u2019s Papageorge was working with a 6 x 9 Fujica equipped with a flash \u2013 resulting in negatives richer in mid-tones, subtler and more descriptive than any he had been able to make previously. The change in format was, he maintained, a response to an exhibition of prints by Brassai that he had visited in 1968.<\/p>\n
![\"tp3.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.foto8.com\/live\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/tp3.jpg?resize=470%2C316&ssl=1\" "\\"tp3.jpg\\"")
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That said, Papageorge\u2019s shift to medium format work and the \u201cenormously frustrating\u201d Fujica can be mapped onto a more widespread contemporary retreat from traditionally defined 35mm street photography. (Meyerowitz, remember, would work eventually in colour with a large format plate camera). Similarly, his use of the Park as subject \u2013 with its potential for seclusion and repose \u2013 represented a move away from such stridently public spaces as the open road (of Robert Frank) or the crowded sidewalk (of Garry Winogrand). Passing through Eden<\/em> can be read as the product of a fascinating period of transition in which the techniques of street photography could be applied to the picturing of privacy, stillness\u2026and maybe even poetry. <\/p>\n Exhibition at the Michael Hoppen Gallery, London SW3 until April 12. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park (Steidl. \u00a332)<\/em><\/div>\n![\"\u00a9](\"https:\/\/www.foto8.com\/live\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/tpintro.jpg\" "\\"\u00a9")
Addressing an audience at the Victoria and Albert museum recently, Tod Papageorge recalled the moment in 1962 when he decided to become a photographer. He was studying poetry at the University of New Hampshire when he came across two pictures from what he described as \u201ca totally radical body of photographic work, one of the great artistic achievements of the twentieth century \u2013 that includes all media\u201d<\/div>\n