Dr. Blankman's New York. Kodachromes 1966-1967

Tod Papageorge produced the photographs for Dr. Blankman's New York in 196667, on the heels of moving into the city. Photographer friends persuaded him that he could help pay the rent by landing some magazine assignments, and that a carousel tray of slides would be the best way of convincing art directors to take a chance on him. So, often after spending a day in the streets photographing in black-and-white, he would put a roll of Kodachrome film in his camera on his walk home and make color pictures, in many cases of shop windows, a subject he was convinced might help him earn a bit of commercial work. This re-issue of Dr. Blankman's New York, first published by Steidl in 2017, has enlarged the size of the plates and, with one exception, condensed the original design to a series of double spreads, intensifying the sense that what Papageorge was doing in these photographs was elaborating, on a parallel track, the portrayal of Manhattan presented in the black-and-white work of Down to the City, the first volume of his War and Peace in New York (also published by Steidl this season). For even their saturated colors and outwardly unremarkable subjects fail to dispel the impression that, rather than winning a magazine job, the shadow of the long war in Vietnam and the hysteria it sparked were the impulses actually charging the photographer's eye and deepest feelings.

Auteur
Tod Papageorge was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1940, and began photographing during his last semester of college before graduating with a degree in English literature in 1962. In the 1970s he received two Guggenheim Fellowships and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grants, and in 1979 he was named Walker Evans Professor at the Yale School of Art, where he was also Director of Graduate Studies of Photography until 2013. His work has been widely exhibited and is represented in over 30 major public collections. In 2009 Papageorge was a resident at the American Academy in Rome, and in 2010 he was awarded the Rome Commission in Photography. In 2012 he received the Lucie Award for documentary photography. Steidl has published Papageorge's Passing Through Eden. Photographs of Central Park (2007) and Dr. Blankman's New York (2018), now to be released in new editions.