The collective PaJaMa—whose name combines the first names of its three members—formed in the late 1930s, when Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French began using a shared Leica to photograph their intertwined lives. On Fire Island and Nantucket beaches, they posed one another and their circle of dancers, models, and artists, building scenes from driftwood, fabric, and the play of bodies against sun and sand. When Margaret Hoening French sent a group of these photos to their friend George Platt Lynes, he replied, "Why don’t you—all get a movie camera and really go to work?"
409: Dance Index, 2026
Gallery label from Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern , March 17 – June 15, 2019.
During vacations in Cape Cod and Fire Island, Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French photographed each other on the beach and indoors, donning makeshift costumes and building sets and props out of found architecture and objects. They passed the camera around, becoming subjects and makers in turn. This collaborative authorship was reflected in the name they chose, which fuses the first two letters of their first names: PaJaMa.
Cadmus explained, “After we’d been working most of the day, we’d go out late afternoons and take photographs when the light was best. They were just playthings. We would hand out these little photographs when we went to dinner parties, like playing cards.”
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Dance Index
Gallery 409This gallery borrows its title from that of a journal established in 1942 by Lincoln Kirstein—a cultural polymath who cofounded New York City Ballet and was a key figure in MoMA’s early history.
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