An interview with Tod Papageorge in foto8 that takes us back to American photography in the 1960-70s. As the head of Yale University's graduate photography department he is widely regarded as the bridge between Henri Cartier Bresson's school of the 'decisive moment' and the American school of photographic realism exemplified by Gary Winogrand and Robert Frank.

However, his work---Passing through Eden and American Sports, 1970-----is not widely known and he has been absent from New York galleries for more than 20 years. The aesthetic in the 1960s was a street photography one----raw (Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand) as opposed to cooked (Ansel Adams or Paul Strand).Though raw the street photos were more akin to picture-poems in seeing a photograph not as a picture, but as the literal world held in their palm.

Papageorge says that he started to photograph because poetry was impossible for me, not realizing that photography was at least as difficult, and also not anticipating how, as with poetry, that difficulty can, in itself, create an addiction in those people who see this kind of creative test as something monumentally attractive. He adds:

Photographing in the street with a Leica doesn’t have much to do with planning. You walk out the door and—bang!—like everyone else, you’re part of the great urban cavalcade. But unlike everyone else, you’re carrying an amazing little machine that, joined with a lot of effort, can pull poetry out of a walk downtown. All of the failed pictures you’ve ever made, all of the other photographs you’ve ever loved, even songs and lines from poems walk with you too, insinuating themselves into your decisions about what you’ll make your photographs of, and how you’ll shape them as pictures. The process, if anything, is intuitive rather than the product of planning—although the fact that very few people have been able to produce this kind of work at a high level also suggests how difficult it is. In other words, intuitive may not be an adequate word for describing the stew of wildness, dogged work and hard thought that goes into producing the best of this kind of photography.

Bresson’s pictures—especially those made after WW II--generally invoke the sweeping sculptural form of European painting....that they were always trying to be beautiful.Garry Winogrand’s photographs did not succeed through “significant form”—a phrase you can find in philosophy of aesthetics textbooks—but though “signifying form”; in other words, a pictorial form just robust enough to carry his pictures’s meanings. Beauty, or design, had nothing to do with what he was interested in. Winogrand said often that “there’s no way a photograph has to look.” In other words, he believed that it could look any way, with the understanding that the less it looked like the kinds of pictures artists make, the greater chance it might have to look like an interesting photograph.