NYAB Event - Paul McDonough "New York City 1973-1978"

Paul McDonough "New York City 1973-1978"

Sasha Wolf Gallery

This event has ended.

This exhibition showcases photographs made by McDonough on the streets of New York City during the years 1973-1978, which, together with the photographs from McDonough's previous show at Sasha Wolf Gallery (Paul McDonough New York City 1968-1972) , are included in the aforementioned monograph.

Paul McDonough arrived in New York City in 1967 with a 35mm camera and entrée, through childhood friend Tod Papageorge, to the photography workshops and social networks of street photographer Garry Winogrand. Emerging from an early career as a studio easel painter, McDonough found photographing on the streets of New York liberating: "It satisfied my sketching impulses... I learned to carry a camera everywhere, all the time, loaded with 400-speed film."

In the late 1960s the activity on the streets of New York City had the feeling of improvisational theater. The social climate was changing dramatically, people were acting and dressing more outrageously, and among the crowds there were frequent anti-war and anti-establishment demonstrations. For the photographic artist, subject matter was everywhere, and, according to McDonough "...the event itself, I came to learn, didn't have to be dramatic; the drama could consist of something as simple as two people making eye contact. Whatever sense or suggestion of narrative that follows is provided, for the most part, by the viewer. The resulting photograph is a much more complex thing, more complex than what is simply observed."

McDonough's photographs from this time are characterized by the spontaneous aesthetic of street photography wherein both the photographer and the subject encounter one another fleetingly, in motion. There is no familiarity beyond that glance and the gesture of making the photograph, but there is often a sense of intimacy in the result. The celebration of this transient intimacy is the subject of McDonough's work.