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Papageorge Pass

Back in January, Tod Papageorge swung by 2point8 to make a clarification, so I pinged him for an interview, which unfortunately never came to pass. But he and Alec Soth took-up the conversation this week, and I’m happy they did.

Better still was the last day of Papageorge’s show at Pace in NYC, and lingering there with friends in a way that seemed to delay the gallery workers from pulling the prints down (their eagerness to put new work up on the last day of Papageorge’s show seemed strange). The prints were sharp and alive, and now, thanks to the Soth interview, we know that Papageorge’s printer is Sergio Purtell.

I’m glad Alec’s taken-up examining “Passing Through Eden” at length, and that he’s leaving us great bits, like this, from an old essay of Papageorge’s in Aperture:

Cameras are like dogs, but dumb, and toward quarry, even more faithful. They point, -they render, and defy the photographer who hopes. Photography investigates no deeper relief than surfaces. It is superficial, in the first sense of the word; it studies the shape and skin of things, that which can be seen. By a passionate extension of this, its most profound meanings have to do with immanence, the indwelling grace of what Zen calls our ten thousand facts. This is not transport, or celestial transcendence, but that more footed joy and grief found near any clear sighting of the word.