Bøker av Tod Papageorge

In January 1967, the jazz composer and pianist Carla Bley (1936-2023) received a poem in the mail from a writer-friend, Paul Haines. As she later said, it "fit mysteriously with a piece of music I was working on, Detective Writer Daughter. When I told [Paul] how amazing this was, we decided to write an opera together, an overstatement by two people who didn't have to watch their words." In 1971, the result of this collaboration-the more than two-hour "chronotransduction" (as Bley came to call it) Escalator Over the Hill-was released. Featuring over 50 musicians and 20 vocalists such as Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Roswell Rudd, Gato Barbieri, John McLaughlin, Jack Bruce and Linda Ronstadt, Escalator was named Jazz Album of the Year by Melody Maker in 1972 and awarded the Grand Prix du Disque the year after that.Included with the LP was a catalogue of pictures of the musicians and recording sessions made by the photographers Tod Papageorge (who also sings on the album), Garry Winogrand and Paul McDonough. McDonough was also responsible for pasting the edited prints to paper boards and arranging the final layout of the catalogue. A selection of those photographs and boards, including design indications and notes, is highlighted in And It's Again: Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill, along with the composer's extraordinary narrative-chronicle of the making and recording of the album, Accomplishing Escalator.Co-produced with ECM Records, Munich

Tod Papageorge started photographing intensely in New York¿s Central Park in the late 1970s and continued working there until he moved from the city in the early 1990s. More than ten years later, he edited these pictures into a book which, in its marriage of the sensual and poetic, evokes the prelapsarian Eden suggested by its title.This re-issue of Passing Through Eden duplicates the first 2007 edition in its entirety, including Papageorge¿s thoughtful essay on the evolution of his photography and its basis in his early attempts to write poetry. His essay further describes how the first half of the book follows the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, from the Creation through the (metaphorical) generations that follow Cain, suggesting how, even in the heart of a modern city, we might find echoes of elemental Biblical tales being acted out around us by those drawn into the park and its promise of beauty and peace. This section of Passing Through Eden then leads to a run of pictures confirming that the human comedy is equally alive and well in the park, even as its landscape¿delightful and wild¿retakes center stage to end the book.

Tod Papageorge produced the photographs for Dr. Blankman¿s New York in 1966¿67, on the heels of moving into the city. Photographer friends persuaded him that he could help pay the rent by landing some magazine assignments, and that a carousel tray of slides would be the best way of convincing art directors to take a chance on him. So, often after spending a day in the streets photographing in black-and-white, he would put a roll of Kodachrome film in his camera on his walk home and make color pictures, in many cases of shop windows, a subject he was convinced might help him earn a bit of commercial work.This re-issue of Dr. Blankman¿s New York, first published by Steidl in 2017, has enlarged the size of the plates and, with one exception, condensed the original design to a series of double spreads, intensifying the sense that what Papageorge was doing in these photographs was elaborating, on a parallel track, the portrayal of Manhattan presented in the black-and-white work of ¿Down to the City,¿ the first volume of his War and Peace in New York (also published by Steidl this season). For even their saturated colors and outwardly unremarkable subjects fail to dispel the impression that, rather than winning a magazine job, the shadow of the long war in Vietnam and the hysteria it sparked were the impulses actually charging the photographer¿s eye and deepest feelings.