"In Dr. Blankman´s New York , I hope you'll find a persuasive account of what it meant for me to be free with a Leica in the streets of my then newly-adopted home of Manhattan, a record drawn in the saturated colors of Kodachrome film, where even the heavy shadows pouring into the backdrop-avenues of the pictures seem full of depth. I'd never worked in color before, but, just 25 and starting out, I was soon convinced by photographer-friends that I could pay the rent by landing a bit of magazine work, and that a carousel-tray of color slides would be the best way of convincing editors to take a chance on me. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I responded to my friends' suggestion by photographing the street in much the way I'd been doing in black-and-white, but also - and new for me - I began intuitively making still-life pictures of shop windows and signs, where fruit or Brillo boxes were as likely to turn up as subjects as a political poster pasted over with images of a weeping Vietnamese girl. Clearly not a formula for commercial success. So, of course, I failed in reaching my immediate goal of making a living through photography, but the journey that the project forced on me - producing pictures in a fresh medium, and, just as crucially, at a time when thoughts of assassination, "The Summer of Love," and the war in Vietnam were as present as the weather - has resulted so many years later in a new thing, this book." - Tod Papageorge

Tod Papageorge was born in Portsmouth in 1940, and began photographing during his last semester at the University of New Hampshire, where he graduated with a degree in English literature in 1962. During the 1970s, he received two Guggenheim Fellowships and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grants and, in 1979, was named the Walker Evans Professor at the Yale School of Art, where, until 2013, he also held the position of Director of Graduate Studies of Photography. Papageorge's work has been widely exhibited internationally and is represented in over thirty major public collections. In 2009, Papageorge was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome and, in 2010, awarded the Rome Commission in Photography. In 2012, he received the Lucie Award for documentary photography. Steidl published Papageorge's Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park in 2007.