LOS ANGELES, CA.- Danziger Gallery L.A. is presenting the first showing of Tod Papageorge’s photographs of Los Angeles beachgoers, made in the late 1970s and early 80s.

An early participant in the American school of street photography Tod Papageorge’s path has taken him from the streets of New York to the capitals of Europe, from black and white to color, and from small to mid-sized cameras. Central to his art (if not his life) is the question of what makes a photograph extraordinary, even as he uses nothing more than direct observation of our common, physical world in his efforts to trace a revelatory moment.

Such moments distinguish this exhibition, which, although the photographs were made more than 40 years ago, looks as if it was produced yesterday. By weaving together the unselfconscious beauty and physicality of the pictures’ subjects with the elemental landscape they move through into a series of distinct tableaux, time is suspended, even as the moments that the photographs memorialize startle us with their immediacy and vitality:

A slim man rises above a crowd, posed like a statue. A girl with a flower in her hair tenderly brushes her boyfriend’s hair. Surfers on their way to the waves arrange themselves in formation like a group of young heros.

In these lightstruck black and white pigment prints we are transported by a singular vision that eloquently reminds us of how the world and a camera can be brought together to create poetry.

The recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, Papageorge’s work is represented in more than forty private and museum collections, including MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, SF MoMA, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris; it has also been published in seven monographs. And, as the Director of the Yale MFA photography program from 1979 to 2013 Papageorge’s influence as both photographer and teacher continues to reverberate in the world of photography.