War and Peace in New York. Photographs 1966–1970

Tod Papageorge’s War and Peace in New York. Photographs 1966–1970 comprises two books of pictures he made after moving to Manhattan as a young man. As different as they are from one another—each book advances a distinct argument supporting Papageorge’s belief in photographic “fiction-making”—together they amount to a comprehensive portrait of an uneasy city during a grim, fevered time.
“Down to the City” follows (and ironically twists) the first sentences of Plato’s Republic, threading phrases from Socrates’ description of a religious festival through a stream of pictures seized in Manhattan’s secular streets. This novel-like flow builds the sense of a place haunted by dystopian disorder, which is amplified late in the book when the war in Vietnam, along with the rage it generated, takes center stage, clarifying the often comic but ambiguous tensions leading to that moment.
“The Dear Common Round” traces a softer arc. Here the guileless actions and exchanges that a great city’s people make in the streets thousands of times a day are photographically honored simply and directly, as if the style of picture-making, at least initially in the book, had reverted to the first days of hand-camera photography. This changes as the sequence progresses, but for all its increasing visual and narrative complexity “The Dear Common Round” holds true to the promise of its opening: this is a city sweet, if serious, at its heart, built to belong to and cherish.

Co-published with Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne