The original context, of course, was the Vietnam War, a storm cloud that, through the last years of the 60s, overarched our daily lives here in America with a terrible weight….What had been general and unbearable became specific and agonizing. At least that’s how I felt as I set out on this project, a feeling I carried with me through the eight months that I worked on it and through Nixon’s presidency and the rest of the war….But while there’s an obvious parallel between that war and Bush’s wars today, and one I meant to draw with this book, it’s difficult for me to identify any existential connection between the hysterical state of things back then and the narcotised country I find myself living in today…”

-Tod Papageorge on American Sports 1970: or How We Spent the War in Vietnam in an interview with Foto8

Foto8’s just published a long interview with Tod Papageorge. Well worth a read. He discusses the recent publication of his books American Sports 1970: or How We Spent the War in Vietnam and Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, the nature of “documentary photography,” collaboration with Garry Winogrand, and other topics.

Related: here’s Papageorge’s Wikipedia page (2 Guggenheim Fellowships!), his bio at Yale’s School of Art, and a selection of his work at Pace/MacGill