Opening Reception of Todd Papageorge: At the Beach + In the Pool: On Influenceat MoCA Westport : It Will Go On

June 26 – October 12, 2025

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.”

For more information

Gallery Hours:

Thursday: 12-8 PM
Friday: 12-5 PM
Saturday: 10 AM-5 PM
Sunday: 12-5 PM