MoCA CT will be presenting a major photography exhibition, Tod Papageorge: At the Beach, alongside works by Papageorge’s former graduate students, In the Pool. The companion exhibitions were organized by the photographer Lisa Kereszi, and showcase the work of Tod Papageorge (b. 1940), a Connecticut-based, internationally-acclaimed artist and teacher whose contributions to American street photography in the 1960s helped shape the genre. His work is held in more than thirty prominent public collections, including the Museums of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco.

At the Beach, making its East Coast debut at MoCA CT, will feature work in the form of large-scale black and white photographs that Papageorge produced with medium-format cameras during several trips to the beaches of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. As he has written about this project: “I think that part of what these pictures are about is the difference between our preconceptions of a place and what, when we get there, that place turns out to be. To describe a subject and, 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 photographs. With these pictures, 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 might be, all while transforming the casual, unselfconscious physicality of these beachgoers into resonant form and meaning.”

The title of the adjacent exhibition, In the Pool, refers to the nickname for the classroom Papageorge taught in for the last third of his teaching career, a renovated swimming pool within the School of Art building. As a professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at the Yale School of Art from 1979-2013, Papageorge mentored many future influential photographers and art educators, with 41 of his students going on to receive Guggenheim Fellowships, a significant marker of achievement in the art and photography world. This part of the exhibition commemorates that fact by exhibiting a single print from each of those Guggenheim Fellows, as well as presenting work through a looping slideshow of virtually all 295 of Papageorge’s former MFA students. It’s also worth noting that the work composing In the Pool was made while the photographers were students in the Yale program, years before being selected (by each one of them) for a portfolio created in honor of Papageorge’s retirement as director of the program. These nearly 300 pictures, then, serve to offer some insight into the nature of influence and mentorship in the arts, and to suggest the power of the ongoing moment that is the still-developing history of photography.