Digging deeper into Tod Papageorge’s ‘Passing Through Eden’

Over the last couple of years, there’s been much discourse and deliberation over Tod Papageorge’s book Passing Through Eden. In March, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a talk he gave in London as part of the events surrounding his nomination for the 2009 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

For those new to the work, Passing Through Eden was influenced by the biblical Book of Genesis:

The sequencing of the book, or at least the first half of it, is quite literally based on the first six chapters of Genesis. The world, or Eden, or Central Park, is created in the first half-dozen pictures, one for each day of the Creation: Adam appears as a pile of molten dust, then as his radiant self; Eve arrives opposite a picture of bleached branches that, to me, suggests her emergence from Adam’s rib; and on it goes… – Tod Papageorge

Flipping through my own copy of the book, I’d often speculated on the nature and emphasis of this biblical allusion, wondering just how explicit it was beyond the initial few pages. With my days of enforced scripture class long past, I struggled to discern much beyond a few vague inferences and eventually resigned myself to a state of muted perplexity.

Fortunately, during the presentation Papageorge generously volunteered some insights into his editing process and I found myself both surprised and impressed by the ambition behind the work. Rather than entrusting to a generally amorphous Genesis-themed representation, individual photographs were selected to denote characters and incidents within specific verses of the bible.

To illustrate, here are a few images that were specifically highlighted: I’ve added relevant excerpts from Genesis to flesh out the back story. With these images serving as chronological markers, I was then also able to identify additional connections from the biblical text.

So God created man in his own image

Adam

And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

Eve

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Adam and Eve

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.

The Serpent

And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

Eve and the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

Eve eating the fruit

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

'The eyes of both were opened'

Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

The explusion from Paradise

And Adam knew Eve his wife…

'And Adam knew Eve his wife...'

and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.
And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

Adam and Cain

Adam and Abel

Cain and Abel

And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

The murder of Abel

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?
And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.
And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand;

God admonishing Cain

And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

The marked Cain

Until that point, I had never quite realised how deeply down the rabbit hole Papageorge had descended; it would be fair to say that neither myself or the majority of the audience expected such an intimate relationship between the photos and the text. Afterwards, I asked my friends A and Z for their opinions, which proceeded to differ by the range of the alphabet:

It’s completely changed my approach to looking at the work, I’ll have to re-examine everything in light of this! – A

Without doubt it’s a clever exercise and adds some meat to the project, but ultimately, and in the nicest way, they’re still just photos made in Central Park, no more, no less. – Z

Equally provoking was the reminder that the Genesis motif had been conceived only as the book was being assembled, long after the photos had been made. What A and Z said started me thinking about the effectiveness of similar projects that have been conceptualised post-hoc, after the act of making the work. However, I soon ran into difficulty when identifying strongly-themed projects that were admittedly ‘post-hoc’; it’s something that never seems to be advertised as such.

Alec Soth’s The Last Days of W sounds like it was made post-hoc, while Jason Fulford’s Raising Frogs for $ $ $ (some pictures here) might fall under this category too, but beyond that few obvious candidates sprang immediately to mind (please feel free to add to this list by leaving a comment).

Without wanting to enter into a deep philosophical and theoretical debate (but with a hankering for a shallow one), I posed the question to some friends: can you think of reasons why projects like these appear to be a rarity?

One theory was that they were more common than admitted to:

I even suspect many photographers are lying when they say they had it all planned in advance and that they spent ages working on one particular concept, when in fact they just threw it together at the end. It feels like the former approach is regarded as more respectable: smarter and more insightful. – R

If lying is too strong a word, than perhaps a post-facto recognition of organic growth:

And honestly, I think the most lying happens when someone realizes that they’ve stumbled across their subject matter which they happen to have been shooting for years, but just haven’t realized it. Then, upon realization, they’ve been doing it on purpose all along, naturally. – M

The band played on, leading to a thought-provoking discussion which arose from a query by Eliot Shepard regarding the difficulty and validity of bringing meaning to work seemingly made at random. Reading through it, the point being made was that ultimately of course, it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter how the photos were made or if there was any conscious intent behind their making or whether said intent was later attached to them. All that matters is that they “work” as a collective whole. A photographer sufficiently talented, ruthless and intelligent will find a successful approach to photographing, editing and sequencing.

As Michael David Murphy put it:

A collection of strong photographs held together by an oblique concept (that allows the viewer the space to breathe and create their own connections) is an experience that can’t be touched by an easy-to-describe project with an air-tight, marketable concept populated with unfeeling, anaemic pictures.

The concept is not king. Randomness is a myth.

Does Passing Through Eden succeed in this respect? The answer has to be undoubtedly yes. The Genesis theme, while fascinating (especially upon further revelation), isn’t evident to many readers, nor is it necessary to the success of the images. Instead, it hangs like a delicate thread throughout the book, sometimes glimpsed, flitting in and out of the light. There are no heavy-handed concepts that burst forth to remorselessly hammer themselves into the viewer’s psyche; rather, sufficient latitude is preserved for individuals to draw their own conclusions. The work can be successfully appreciated in either complete ignorance, semi-awareness (with the perception of a palpable yet indistinct Genesis reference: my state of “muted perplexity”), or the full awareness that comes with being able to connect the dots between individual images.

Papageorge himself said it best:

…the fact is that attempting to weave these disparate images into some twentieth-century New York City version of the First Story gave me a form that I felt could provide a much more flexible armature for the shape of the book (and the large number of pictures I wanted to include in it) than the usual photographic monograph. I also wanted to make a book that could be understood in as many ways as possible, even if it risked the possibility that a reader more interested in decoding the sequence of Biblical references could well miss the ambition informing the pictures, and what I hope is the poetry animating them.

Clever man that he is, that goal has successfully been achieved.

Another clever man is Alec Soth. While the Last Days of W may not have been well-received in some quarters (indeed that particular critique highlights some of the potential minefields in post-facto projects), Soth has been spectacularly successful in other endeavours.

I recall having a convivial chat with someone quite high up the Magnum food chain about this:

You know, that Alec Soth is a very, very clever fellow.

Really?

Yeah… you know NIAGARA of course? It has a theme of love running throughout:there’s a repeated heart motif in many of the images. But did you know that to maintain this, Soth also actually POSED the couples he photographed in a shape of a heart?? Now THAT’S clever!

Regardless of the veracity of this tale and Soth’s actual intentions, the best part about this anecdote is that like any truly great conspiracy theory, there’s just enough evidence for it to be vaguely plausible. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s just a fascinating (or ridiculous, depending on your perspective) story that may add to the NIAGARA mystique.

Take a look for yourself: do you see hearts? Do you care?

Aleisha and Joe

Martha and Anthony

Michelle and Pedro

As many have already noted: he’s a clever man that Alec Soth…

All photographs in this article © Tod Papageorge and Alec Soth respectively.
Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park by Tod Papageorge. NIAGARA by Alec Soth.

Additional notes

Blake Andrews includes a great comparison with Robert Crumb.