By Jeffrey Whetstone, September 10, 2025
For a half century, Tod Papageorge has insisted that paying close attention to the chaotic world through the measured frame of a camera can expand the possibilities of artistic expression. This theory has been borne out through Papageorge’s work and teaching, where the attention he has paid to photography and photographers over the years has made him a pillar of the medium.
His is a modernist idea — that poetic power can emerge from framing and describing, essentially analyzing the world through a perspective prescribed by a camera. The exhibition, “At the Beach + In the Pool: On Influence” through October 26 at MOCA Connecticut is evidence why Papageorge’s essentialist views on what makes a good photograph have had such a lasting impact on three generations of artists.
“The more specific you are the more general you will be,” photographer Lisette Model once told her student Diane Arbus. The legendary comment has come to mean that the descriptive language of photography is in service to connecting us through the visual poetics of familiar textures, repetitions and rhythms; universal expressions and postures. For Model the power of the medium relies on the craft of description.
That maxim of specificity has informed the school of thought at the MFA program in Photography at the Yale School of Art for the past half century. As the Director of the program from 1979 to 2013, Papageorge helped shape this aesthetic.
The program has graduated a pantheon of some of the most important photographers working today such as Dawoud Bey, An My Lê, Gregory Crewdson, Katy Grannan, and Philip Lorca-DiCorcia, just to list a few.
Organized by Assistant Director of Photography at Yale Lisa Kereszi, the exhibition is presented in two main parts: work made while they were enrolled in the Yale MFA program from 41 of Papageorge’s students who went on to win Guggenheim Fellowships, and selections from two of Papageorge’s own projects—"Los Angeles Beaches” and “Passing through Eden” (photographs taken in NYC’s Central Park.)
The through line of the exhibition is that most of the photographs in the exhibition suggest open ended narratives, allowing the viewer to find that universal in the specific. The pictures imply stories, which is expected from the medium of photography; however, the primary vehicle for implicating a narrative is the exacting description of the objects in the frame, and a perspectival, compositional approach born from the history of painting.
One of the aspects where the two exhibitions— those of the former Yale students and Papageorge’s own — differ is that Papageorge’s photographs of Los Angeles beaches have many, many more people in them. So many people, in fact, that the pictures are cacophonous, almost chaotic. Entangled legs shove disheveled towels into the sand around single sandals, belching trash cans, biceps, butts, body hair, cigarettes, and children. Most of the pictures of Los Angeles beaches are filled corner to corner with things to look at, and all are given equal weight. Everything is very clearly presented— from the quality of the bristles of the brush sliding through a boyfriends’ hair to the tiny bite out of an apple gifted from an outstretched arm. The details have the cumulative effect of drawing the viewer a few inches away from the image and immersing them in a realm of illuminated details pregnant with meaning.
The beach sand in these pictures is often like sugar, reflecting light upward and into the shadows. It makes the whole scene look like a stage. In the photograph, Manhattan Beach 1981, in the right and left foreground, are empty beach chairs. They are like a visual funnel into the tableau. In the center foreground, a group of friends sprawl in the sand, and their feet seem too numerous for their bodies. It’s too hot to cuddle, but the man has his leg over his girlfriend like he is guarding her or trying to keep her from escaping. She doesn’t want to go anywhere. She is locked in a conversation with a girl to her right holding a comb in her hand as if it were a conductor's baton. The boyfriend of the trapping legs is engaged with a girl in the shade sitting on top of the cooler. Her expression says she can’t hear him over the noise. The main character of this scene is sitting on top her boyfriend’s hip. She stares off stage left, with her hand dramatically across her mouth. In the middle ground the chorus is turned away from us, watching what appears to be a volleyball game. In the distance, on the other side of the court, a line of a hundred people looks in our direction. Everyone is watching everyone and being watched; it’s a picture about the ritual of looking. It conjures the most elemental part of being a human, our social nature and fascination with others.
And it is a picture that barely staves off pure chaos, but Papageorge brilliantly contains it without constraining it. Harmonies and visual rhythms emerge, like all the loose shoes scattered through the image— in the sand, in peoples’ hands— among but not on all the bare feet. It could never be created. It can only be observed.
It is important to note that Papageorge walked the beaches in street clothes. He was not in a participant in these poetic narratives. He was an observer; staunchly separate from the people he was photographing. “I never said a word to anyone there,” he stated in an interview with Kereszi. Henri Cartier-Bresson, who is one of Papageorge’s most important inspirations, talked about taking pictures in public like this, “I am looking at the stage and all these actors. I can applaud them, but they’ve got a set of rules, and I’m not supposed to step in and jump in on the stage and play with them.”
This is a contentious position in a medium as public and powerful as photography. There is a notion that perhaps photography should be for, by, and about the community being photographed, which is a very understandable position considering all the ways the medium has been used to degrade people and capitalize on the marginalized. Papageorge sees photography as not a tool, however, but “as a kind of language.” In 1979, he wrote, “If we also understand that this language will be used and misused in as many ways as words are,” Papageorge states, “the medium will then not be held responsible for the way it is generally perceived and employed: it will be seen to simply be a medium, a way to meaning.” Since he made this statement, photography has reached a kind of singularity point with language as we speak it and transmit it like we do text. Our social technology is built around communicating with pictures.
Photography, like a young river, changes its course as it evolves, often doubling back in a reverse direction or leaving part of its history cleaved off and stagnant.
The chapter of photography’s history that Papageorge champions is a deep channel. It is the notion that a person with a camera can simply go out in the world and “put a frame around a set of facts” and make a readable, relatable, poetic piece of art. Sounds simple enough. But to sustain a voice in that register requires a dedicated “zone of attention,” as Papageorge describes it, demanding one to abstain from preconceptions or even imagination— so that curiosity can drive the process of making photographs.
It’s a romantic notion. And very heady. But as the world has shifted politically, culturally, aesthetically and spiritually in the era that Papageorge has been working and teaching, he has held fast to a belief in the medium’s ability to transform a chaotic world by attentively framing it into a poetic one. And that could be done anywhere.
Papageorge was not primarily interested in the beach, or in youth culture, or in bodies, or in what California meant. He was interested in how the “realm” of the beach, as he called it, with a foreground the color of the sky, and with light bouncing off the sand and penetrating all shadows, and a mass of people being people, intertwined bare skin on skin: what possibilities could that hold for a photograph. How varied are all the specificities in that expansive volume of light. And if they are indeed, as William Carlos Williams famously asserted, “no ideas but in things,” this setting allows things to shine, and to never be occluded by an uninterpretable shadow.
This exhibition makes clear that Papageorge searched for sites— like Manhattan’s central Park, the public Beaches of Los Angeles, and in past work, football stadiums and tourist meccas — where the public convenes in maximal social performance. His committed attention to public America has helped build a space for a photography that is not journalistic or documentary, yet gauges the social realities of fractious politics, changing cultural norms, timeless human attractions, and the common textures and gestures that we share.
Papageorge’s zone of attention obviously extended into the critique space for his students. While he was stringently observational in his practice, he was readily participatory in rearing a community of artists who adhered to the notion of a modernist approach to photography. In a world devoid of attention, Papageorge’s life’s work is remarkable for its insistence upon it.
Jeffrey Whetstone is a photographer, writer, and educator. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 and is a professor in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University.
TOD PAPAGEORGE "Manhattan Beach," 1978.
TOD PAPAGEORGE, "Los Angeles", 1975.
TOD PAPAGEORGE, "Zuma Beach", 1978.
TOD PAPAGEORGE" Manhattan Beach (Wilt Chamberlain)", 1981.