ALEXANDRO SEGADE: There is a playfulness in some of these photographs, I look at the ones where it's Lincoln Kirstein with Dog or Paul Cadmus lying on his back with a flower.
MALIK GAINES: Hi. I'm Malik Gaines.
ALEXANDRO SEGADE: I'm Alexandro Segade.
MALIK GAINES: We are artists, and we collaborate together and with other people. And that's one of the things we love about these PaJaMa photos.
ALEXANDRO SEGADE: We knew Cadmus’s work before, just being interested in histories of queer and gay cultural representation in a lot of his early paintings from the 30’s. And then finding that he’d collaborated with these two other painters on a series of photographs over several years in Fire Island and other places we see as sort of historically connected to the development of a queer or gay sensibility in art, and also culture, more broadly in the United States.
MALIK GAINES: And we were really interested in the way that these images read as queer, even in a time before a kind of representation of gay culture or gay identity really is more organized in public.
ALEXANDRO SEGADE: Well, it's interesting, because, I think some of these, I mean the images were…
MALIK GAINES: There’s a lot of veiling of bodies, a lot of veiling of faces, presentation and hiding at the same time. There's body as a decorative thing in a landscape or in an architecture. No one is really classically posed, they're all kind of draped, and splayed, and arrayed.
ALEXANDRO SEGADE: I get the sense that there was the ability for this group of Bohemians to go to Fire Island, and Provincetown, and other places, and be themselves and allow for a certain kind of performance of desire to take place.