Headed West

After departing Portsmouth, New Hampshire—the seaside city of his childhood—Paul McDonough made his way first to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then to New York City, where his life as a photographer truly unfurled. New York’s ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic street scene captivated him endlessly, yet he felt an insistent pull toward the West and the vast, dreaming country that stretched between the coasts.

From the 1960s through the 1990s, McDonough embarked on numerous photographic journeys, seeking to capture the full chorus of American life: its people and animals, its architecture and landscapes, its bright cities and quiet corners. It was a world untouched by the internet, unbothered by cell phones—alive in a different, thrumming way.

When not traveling, McDonough shared his sharp eye and generous spirit with generations of young artists as a photography instructor at Pratt Institute. A longtime Park Slope local, he wandered its streets with the same attentiveness he brought to the rest of the country, folding Brooklyn’s rhythms into the quiet map of his work.

As Hilton Als of The New Yorker observed, “McDonough’s project, it seems to me, is a kind of record of his life as a walker… 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.”

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