You can feel the heat sizzling off Tod Papageorge’s decades-old photos of the LA coastline and the surf culture around it
Main image: Scorchio … an image from Tod Papageorge’s At The Beach. Photograph: Tod Papageorge
Tue 20 Jun 2023 07.00 BST Last modified on Tue 20 Jun 2023 14.25 BST
In 1975 Tod Papageorge made a cross-America trip that ended on the beaches of Los Angeles. There, taken by the blinding light, he produced some of his first medium-format photographs. In 1978 he returned to Los Angeles to expand on those first pictures and, in 1981 and 1988, on shorter visits, added yet again to this body of work. At The Beach by Tod Papageorge is available to buy through Stanley Barker. All photographs: Tod Papageorge Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Speaking of his experience, Tod Papageorge writes: ‘I think that part of what these beach pictures are about is the difference between our preconceptions of a place and what, when we get there, that place turns out to be’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
‘I think it’s fair to suggest that those preconceptions are particularly strong when it comes to the LA coastline, shaped as they irresistibly have been by the movies and popular music’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
‘So, as a first point, what I wanted to do on this project was examine those preconceptions (at least as I conjured them) through the descriptive power of photography in order to pin down what two semi-myths – the world of surfers and the life of southern California beaches – “really” looked like’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
‘To describe a place and yet at the same time reinvent it, is a double intention on the part of the photographer that we should be used to by now when we look at and think about photographs’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
‘It seems to be a contradiction built into interesting pictures, if not the medium of photography itself’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
‘With these pictures, then, I worked with the belief that the closer I came to describing the literal nature of the place and people I was photographing, the more surprising the pictures that came out of that process might be’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
‘I hoped to transform the casual, unselfconscious physicality of these beachgoers moving from the boardwalks on to the sand and back again, into form and meaning’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
‘I’m speaking of what I hoped for the photographs, of course - they may not describe these things at all’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
‘But whether I’m right or wrong about these particular pictures, it should go without saying that a good photograph must, in some palpable sense, distinguish what it describes’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
