Paul McDonough, whose evocative candid photographs, often of crowds, captured what he called the galvanizing energy of turned-on New Yorkers and the tired West Coast venues where urbanites had fled to tune out, died on March 25 in Brooklyn. He was 84.
His wife, the author Yona Zeldis McDonough, said he died in a nursing home from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Armed with a 35-millimeter Leica or a Siciliano — one of 55 cameras custom-built by his fellow Brooklyn photographer Thomas Roma, who was head of the department of photography at Columbia University’s School of the Arts — Mr. McDonough captured impromptu groups in which individual facial expressions projected multiple impressions; stark romantic images, like a couple kissing in Central Park or youngsters at play; and statues, which he whimsically juxtaposed with human look-alikes.
Mr. McDonough’s works were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library and the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass.; shown at the Sasha Wolf Gallery in Manhattan; and collected in several books, including “New York Photographs: 1968-1978” (2010), “Sight Seeing” (2014) and “Headed West” (2021).
Although he didn’t like to be referred to as a “street photographer,” the streets of New York were his stage. What he called the “walker’s city” provided him with ample subjects, whom he described as his fellow “office workers.”
Writing in The New Yorker in 2014, the critic Hilton Als called Mr. McDonough“a thinker who looks through the eye of his camera to distinguish truth from reality.”
“McDonough’s eye,” Mr. Als wrote in 2010, “is enlivened less by the sweet lyricism Bresson and others have found in the ‘decisive moment’ than in what one might call the surrealism of the everyday.”
Describing a photograph of three women at a pond feeding three pigeons (“Who’s hungrier for the experience? The lovely girls in their summer dresses, or the greedy birds, whose number parallels the girls’ own?”), Mr. Als wrote that Mr. McDonough “lives in a New York only people who come from elsewhere bother to look for, let alone see.”
In each decade from the 1960s through the ’90s, Mr. McDonough preserved New York’s evolving streetscape. He also ventured periodically to America’s West to stretch his perspective beyond the frenetic city.
The Guardian described one of his West Coast vistas, taken at a resort town in Oregon: “The cars on the beach, long noses toward the salt air of the ocean, look impatient to go further; the great American road trip has run out of road.”
Paul Andrew McDonough was born on Feb. 18, 1941, in Portsmouth, N.H., to Mary (Redden) McDonough and John T. McDonough. His father owned a sporting goods store.
After graduating from high school in 1958, Paul moved to Boston, where he studied painting at the New England School of Art (now the New England School of Art and Design) and worked summers drawing portraits on the boardwalk at Hampton Beach, N.H.
He graduated in 1964 and roamed around Vermont that summer before returning to Boston, where he worked in a commercial art studio and gravitated to photography.
“Paul wanted to be a painter but felt he couldn’t sit still long enough,” his wife said in an interview.
Writing in The Paris Review in 2010, Mr. McDonough recalled: “What turned me away from painting was a realization that the streets and parks of Boston provided me with subject matter that I could not conjure up in my studio. At that point, a blank canvas drew nothing but a blank stare.”
In the late 1960s, he moved to New York, where he rented an apartment from Tod Papageorge, a boyhood friend who had become a committed photographer. Mr. Papageorge, who would later become the director of the graduate program in photography at the Yale School of Art, introduced him to another prominent photographer, Garry Winogrand. Both men encouraged him to pursue photography as a profession.
“The energy level of New Yorkers rushing to and from their myriad destinations (and they do move faster here than in any other city) was galvanizing,” Mr. McDonough wrote in The Paris Review.
He started showing his photographs in 1970 and sold three prints to the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. But he spent much of his time teaching, at Pratt Institute, Yale, Marymount Manhattan College, the School of Visual Arts and the Parsons School of Design. His work was first published in its own volume in 2007, after he met Sasha Wolf, the gallerist.
His marriage to Judy Greenwood ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their son, James; their daughter, Kit McDonough; and two sisters, Natalie McDonough and Roni Brown.
“Paul set his camera at a respectful distance from his subjects in order (it seems) to allow them to establish their own weight and authority,” Mr. Papageorge said in an email.
Mr. McDonough explained to Slate in 2013 that taking candid shots had been easier in the 1970s. Today, he said, “where there’s so much media trying to get information from people, people are much more wary. People see cameras as containing the possibility of exploitation. Everyone is spying. Local government, advertisers — they all want to know what it is you are thinking and doing.”
In that same interview, he said that from 36 black-and-white exposures, he might select only two or three that he considered successful.
“When I actually found a successful photograph,” he wrote, “there was the immediate pleasure of seeing how the camera had accommodated my reaction at the moment of pressing the shutter.”
“You were not looking for photographs,” he added, “but for the raw material that would make you want to photograph; the gesture or expression that demanded to be recorded.”
“If I am standing in one place long enough, someone might say, ‘Did you just take a picture of me?’” Mr. McDonough said. “I would reply, ‘What picture?’”
“There are no pictures, I am exposing film. When the film gets developed — that is when I discover pictures.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/arts/paul-mcdonough-dead.html
