For many fans, America's favorite sporting events can provide a beer-and-peanut soaked escape from everyday life. That was certainly true in 1970, a year when the U.S. expanded its involvement in Southeast Asia amid mass protests like Kent State and mounting racial and sexual tensions. In this setting photographer Tod Papageorge turned his lens on the sports arena. His unsettling black-and-white photographs are published together for the first time in American Sports, 1970, or, How We Spent the War in Vietnam  (Aperture, $50).

There is an oppressive weight to these images, at times eased by an ironic sense of humor: well-coiffed cheerleaders practicing under the watchful eye of policemen; kids crowding around a concession stand, one wearing a shirt with the words "fly the friendly skies of Viet Nam"; and bleachers full with both bored Naval officers and fans writhing in despair and jubilation. With a country at war, Papageorge's portrayal of spectator sports reveals a maddening crowd, both helpless and somehow to blame. --TASHA GREEN

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