Paul McDonough was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1941, and studied drawing and painting at the New England School of Art in Boston. In 1981 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. McDonough is represented in a number of public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the New York Public Library. His books include New York Photographs 1968–1978 (2010), Sight Seeing (2014), In the Studio: Photography and Drawings by Paul McDonough (2018) and Headed West (2021). McDonough lives and works in Brooklyn.