NYAB Event - Paul McDonough "Sight Seeing"

Paul McDonough "Sight Seeing"

Sasha Wolf Gallery

This event has ended.

With the photographs in Sight Seeing, McDonough leaves behind his main stomping grounds, the streets of New York City, and sets out on the road, traveling throughout the United States during the summer months of the 1970s and early 80s. Although the landscape he encounters is very different, McDonough's photographs are remarkably similar to his urban pictures. They retain the aesthetic of street photography- pictures secretly made of unsuspecting subjects- but there is also, quite often, a strong sense of intimacy and McDonough's characteristic affection for his subjects. McDonough has often remarked that the intimacy he felt, if only for a second, when he made his photographs of people, was extremely seductive to him, and I think it could be said that that lasting sense of intimacy is what his future audience treasures when confronting his photographs.

In McDonough's travels, he has captured scenes of people at leisure: walking, playing, relaxing and flirting and although he barely stops moving when he makes these pictures, McDonough sacrifices nothing here in the way of composition. His photographs are crisp and clean, light and airy, like the environment he is in. As a result, his composition and content are in perfect balance.

Paul McDonough was born in Portsmouth, NH. After graduating from high school in 1958, he moved to Boston, where he graduated from the New England School of Art. In 1967, he moved to New York City, where he has lived for the past forty years. During that time he has worked as a free-lance photographer, paste-up mechanical artist and photography teacher at Pratt Institute, Yale University, Cooper Union, Marymount College, Parsons School of Design and Fordham University. He has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His work is in a number of public and private collections including, the Museum of Modern Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum, the New York Public Library, the DeCordova Museum, the Dreyfus Corporation, the Lila Acheson Wallace Print Collection and the Joseph Seagram's Collection. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their two children.