Paul McDonough, professor emeritus and photographer best known for depicting street life in New York City, passed away on March 25, 2025. He was 84. He joined Pratt Institute as an adjunct associate professor of photography in 1973, and went on to make a meaningful impact on more than four decades of students. He retired in 2016.
“He taught me patience and about the art of recognizing beauty,” says BFA Photography alumnus Andrew Jarman ’16. “When I think about Paul, I think about Cezanne, I think about Ozu, I think about the parakeets of Green-Wood Cemetery, I think about the act of collecting as a photographic practice, and otherwise.”
McDonough graduated from Boston’s New England School of Art in 1964. In the late 1960s, he moved to New York and began taking film photographs of the people and scenes he encountered in public spaces, capturing the city’s distinctive energy in black-and-white images.
A New York Times obituary notes that “in each decade from the 1960s through the ’90s, Mr. McDonough preserved New York’s evolving streetscape,” adding that he “also ventured periodically to America’s West to stretch his perspective beyond the frenetic city.” He was renowned for capturing spontaneous moments of human interaction.
Over the span of his career, McDonough worked as a freelance photographer, a paste-up mechanical artist, and in a commercial art studio. He exhibited at galleries, published books of his work, and received press from major outlets, including The New Yorker. In a 2014 story for the magazine, Hilton Als said of McDonough’s work, “his photographs are a meeting of the minds—his consciousness meeting yours as yours meets the world. The elegance one sees in his prints is the elegance of a caring artist who knows that without distance there is no critical thought, and without critical thought there is no truth in the frame, or outside of it.”
In addition to his tenure at Pratt, McDonough also taught at Yale University, Cooper Union, Marymount College, Parsons School of Design, School of Visual Arts, and Fordham University.
“I’m grateful to have been the beneficiary of his gentle, powerful generosity and wisdom. He lived his work, and the best parts of him—his empathy, humanism, humor, and sharp skill with a camera among people—can be found there,” said photographer, publisher, and teacher Peter Kayafas, who worked alongside McDonough as a faculty colleague at Pratt for nearly two decades.
McDonough was awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
His work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the DeCordova Museum, the Dreyfus Corporation, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Joseph Seagram Collection, among others.
When McDonough was asked in an interview for Visura Magazine by Guy Anglade, “What is the one lasting impression you want to leave with your photos?,” McDonough answered, “He looked at life as he passed by, with an avid, sympathetic eye.”