Back Talk: Tod Papageorge

Tod Papageorge
Race Day, Indianapolis 500 (May 30, 1970).

In 1970 Tod Papageorge won a Guggenheim Fellowship and set out to photograph spectator sports. He was interested in how 
the "public agony" of the Vietnam War--which, "unlike today, 
permeated every aspect of our lives"--and that "hellish" time could be captured on film. Nearly forty years later, Papageorge, who insists that he is "not a political photographer," has 
published those images as a book, American Sports, 1970: or, How We Spent the War in Vietnam (Aperture). --Christine Smallwood

What was the idea behind the project?

I was using a different machine. On the one hand, the project was shaped by my tremendous feelings about the war, which of course weren't unique. But on the other hand, I was intrigued with the notion of going out and photographing these stadiums full of thousands of people and using a wide-angle lens to do it, a lens that could draw in hundreds of people in a single photograph. And with the problem of making coherent pictures out of it. But in a way it's in the service of an idea about the society, also in the service of my own rage at that time, the rage I was feeling. American sport. What is a sport in biology?

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