The esteemed photographer Paul McDonough has been taking photographs for more than forty years now, and a salient feature of the work seen here, from his project “Sightseeing,” has to do with refinement, elegance. Artists—the best ones—reinvent themselves by continually digging at the essence of the thing they mean to describe. McDonough’s project, it seems to me, is a kind of record of his life as a walker in cities; his pictures are a map of experience, of his consciousness. He is a thinker who looks through the eye of his camera to distinguish truth from reality. That is more difficult, or as difficult, as it sounds. A number of post-Henri Cartier-Bresson artists equate reality with the drama of the moment—a man skipping over a puddle, a young woman crossing a street, that kind of thing...READ MORE

Campervan, Santa Monica Beach, 1977.