The images in Paul McDonough: New York Photographs 1968-1978 document a time of social and political tumult from the particular vantage point of the Gotham streets where the East Coast counterculture wore a specific mask that differentiated it from its West Coast counterpart. Capturing a period from just after the Summer of Love past the end of the Vietnam War, McDonough’s handsome photo book sheds a street-level light on anonymous New Yorkers to find an everyday intimacy in the midst of radical cultural change.
The camera is the perfect machine for recording street life and critic and educator Susan Kismaric invokes Henri Cartier-Bresson in the catalog’s opening essay:
“[...the task of the photographer] is to perceive reality, almost simultaneously recording it in the sketchbook which is our camera.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson
McDonough captures the workaday New York of bustling, briefcase-burdened business men and lonely car salesmen, idling forlornly in a showroom window. Priests pause for McDonough’s camera while a doorman never takes his attention away from the sidewalk that leads up to his welcome. Wealthy society women waltz about in knee-length furs while debutantes wear designer clothes and long white gloves.
McDonough also captures another New York; a younger, freer side of The City where a sidewalk cafe becomes a romantic getaway for one young couple while – perhaps just down the street – a young woman races past a phallanx of New York’s finest decked out in riot gear. A “Censure Nixon” sign is seen smeared with grime and laying in the gutter.
McDonough’s work is certainly democratic, but there is a conscious effort to document that exciting place where these two worlds collide and interact in a manner that is particular to a city that a multitude of races, classes and subcultures call home.
Again, perhaps Kismaric says it best:
“In these pictures, working within a revered tradition so suitable for the pace of modern life, McDonough has applied his finely-tuned intuition to show us nothing less than the poetry of daily life.” – Susan Kismaric
