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Photographs by Paul McDonough
Essay by Susan Kismaric
Interview with the artist by Albert Mobilio

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To purchase a copy of Paul McDonough: New York Photographs 1968-1978, please use the link below:

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RECENT PRESS FOR PAUL MCDONOUGH:

It’s hard to believe, but Paul McDonough’s “New York Photographs: 1968-1978,” is the brilliant photographer’s first monograph. Either that’s a parable about the world of art photography and its habit of relying on the same ten or twelve picture-makers to talk about the form as a whole, or about the difficulty some artists have finding their voice in a post-Henri Cartier Bresson world. Whatever the reason, McDonough’s book is a more-than-welcome addition to what is generally called “street photography.” – Hilton Als, The New Yorker Book Bench

The March 2011 edition of Harper’s Magazine published his 1973 photograph “The Roman Room at the Met”, which appears in the book and was featured at the accompanying show hosted at the Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York City.

Sophisticated Living profiled the book in their July/August 2010 edition in the “New York by Design” section.

Paul McDonough: New York Photographs 1968-1978 has been featured in The Portsmouth Herald, Working Class Magazine, Photo District News: Photo of the Day blog, Gothamist, and online at The Paris Review.

Download the Press Release

McDonough’s photographs from this time period are characterized by the spontaneous aesthetic of street photography wherein both the photographer and the subjects are often in motion. There is no stopping to get to know one another. Just a lot of walking on by. But there’s an intimacy in this body of work – McDonough seems to yearn to know his subjects, beyond the desire to, as Winogrand said, “find out what something will look like photographed.”

Paul McDonough: New York Photographs 1968 – 1978 is being released on November 4th, 2010, in conjunction with an art exhibition of McDonough’s work at Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York’s Chelsea district from November 4th – January 8th 2011.

Paul McDonough was born in Portsmouth, NH. After graduating from high school in 1958, he moved to Boston, where he graduated from the New England School of Art. In 1967, he moved to New York City, where he has lived for the past forty years. During that time he has worked as a freelance photographer, paste-up mechanical artist and photography teacher at Pratt Institute, Yale University, Cooper Union, Marymount College, Parsons School of Design and Fordham University. He has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His work is in a number of public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the DeCordova Museum, the Dreyfus Corporation, the Lila Acheson Wallace Print Collection and the Joseph Seagram’s Collection. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their two children.

Susan Kismaric has been at MoMA since 1976 and has been a curator in the Department of Photography since 1986. She has organized numerous exhibitions, including shimmer of possibility. Photographs by Paul Graham (2009), Fashioning Fiction in Photography (2004), David Goldblatt: Photographs from South Africa (1998), Manual Alvarez Bravo (1997) and Self-Portrait: The Photograph’s Persona 1840-1985 (1985), among many other shows. She has authored numerous books and has been a visiting Senior Critic of Photography at the Yale School of Art since the early 1980s, and is currently an adjunct professor at Fordham University.

Albert Mobilio is the coeditor of Bookforum and the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. His books of poetry include Bendable Siege, The Geographics, Me with Animal Towering, and Letters from Mayhem. He is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College.

Hardcover / $45 USD
10″ x 10.5″ / 90 pages
November 4th, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-884167-99-7