In 1975, Tod Papageorge travelled across America, ending on Los Angeles's beaches. Captivated by the blinding light, he made some of his first medium-format photographs, using 6 × 9 cm. He returned in 1978 to expand the work, adding further images during shorter visits in 1981 and 1988. He writes about At the Beach:
 
"Part of these photographs' subject is the difference between our preconceptions of a place and what we find on arriving. For Los Angeles and its coastline, those preconceptions are particularly strong, irresistibly shaped by cinema and popular music. I wanted to examine them, at least as I understood them, through photography's descriptive power, defining what two near-myths—surfing culture and Southern Californian beach life—actually looked like.
 
Describing a place while reinventing it is a photographer's double intention we should already recognise when looking at photographs. It seems an inherent contradiction in interesting images, if not in photography itself. I worked with the conviction that the closer I came to describing the literal nature of the place and people, the more surprising the resulting images would be. All the while, I hoped to transform the casual, unselfconscious physicality of beachgoers moving between boardwalk and sand into form and meaning.
 
These were my hopes, of course; the photographs may describe none of this. But whether or not I am right about these particular images, a good photograph must somehow palpably distinguish what it describes."
 
Tod Papageorge is an American photographer and teacher who began photographing on New York's streets in the mid-1960s. From 1979 to 2013, he directed Yale School of Art's graduate photography programme. His late-1970s Studio 54 photographs were published by STANLEY/BARKER in 2014.