The New Yorker:

In Tod Papageorge’s photographs of L.A. beachgoers in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, he transforms formally challenging scrums into theatrical vignettes or semi-abstractions.

By Emma Allen

Fifty years ago, a glitchy yet terrifying animatronic shark persuaded movie audiences never to go in the water again. Luckily—for the photographer Tod Papageorge, at least—it didn’t keep people off the beaches. That same year, 1975, Papageorge was slowly making his way across the country, from New York City, where he’d become known for his 35-mm. street scenes, to Los Angeles, where he’d shoot throngs of sun-dazed, sweat-glazed beachgoers with a clunkier medium-format camera. He made four trips to L.A.’s beaches between 1975 and 1988, and a selection of the resulting black-and-white photographs—detail-rich, often dense, rapturous yet funny tableaux of stripped-down bodies engaged in sport or sprawled on the sand—will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Connecticut through October 26th.

Amazingly, few of Papageorge’s subjects stare directly at the guy lugging a 6x9-cm.-format camera around the beach, although, as he said, “even on the nude beaches, I was out there in my street clothes, looking like an idiot.” He noted that this was the same kind of format camera that Brassaï used to photograph in Paris night clubs, in the thirties and forties; Papageorge would also use it to photograph inside Studio 54—a series in which the revellers seem as oblivious to his presence as the sunbathers had been (could there be a correlation between the effects of club drugs and heatstroke?).

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