Tod Papageorge: Dr. Blankman s New York documents a brief but critical moment in the photographer's early career, the two years Papageorge shot in color in New York in the late 1960s. Black-and-white photography was still the "serious" medium, and color reserved for commercial applications; Papageorge--25 years old and newly arrived in New York City--was encouraged by his fellow photographers to seek paying magazine work by developing a body of work in color. In some ways it was a failed experiment: Papageorge mostly approached color in the same way as he approached black and white, except that he also began to intuitively produce still-life pictures with little commercial appeal, spotlighting canned hams in shop windows and political posters. But color offered Papageorge the opportunity to work in a new medium at a time of great social, political and cultural change. "I'd like to think that, in Dr. Blankman s New York, you'll find a persuasive account of what it meant for me to be free with a Leica in the streets of my newly adopted home of Manhattan," writes Papageorge, "a record drawn with Kodachrome film and its rich, saturated colors."
Tod Papageorge (born 1940) picked up photography for the first time as a student at the University of New Hampshire. He is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. From 1979 to 2013 Papageorge served as Yale University's Walker Evans Professor of Photography and Director of Graduate Study in Photography.