Tod Papageorge (b. 1940, Portsmouth, New Hampshire) received a BA in English Literature from the University of New Hampshire in 1962 and a MA from Yale University in 1979. Wandering the streets on daily photographic excursions alongside Paul McDonough, Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand, Papageorge honed his instincts and learned how to anticipate the making of good pictures. His ability to isolate and distill what he saw amidst the chaos of the moving city was initially practiced using a 35mm camera and later fine-tuned with larger-format cameras. Not only does Papageorge recognize the value within the spontaneous moment, but he possesses the technical ability to capture and instill those events with poetry, humor and timeless meaning. Papageorge has been a professor and director of the Yale School of Art since 1979. He has influenced countless students, many of whom have become eminent artists and teachers themselves: Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Anna Gaskell, Katy Grannan, An-My Lê and Abelardo Morell, among others. Papageorge’s work can be found in museums both in the United States and Europe including: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; The Canadian Center of Architecture, Montreal; The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; The George Eastman House, Rochester; The Kunsthaus, Zurich; The Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Papageorge is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships for Photography (1970, 1977) and two Fellowship Grants in Photography from The National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976). Monographs include: Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park (2007) and American Sports, 1970 (2008). The latter body of work was made during Papageorge’s travels across the country on a Guggenheim Grant and documents major national sporting events during the height of the Vietnam War. Go back to top               Printable PDF version