During vacations from the 1930’s through the mid-1950’s, artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and his wife Margaret Hoening French photographed each other on the beaches of New York’s Fire Island as well as Nantucket and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Last summer we focused on their early years on Fire Island. The photos in this post are primarily from Nantucket, Provincetown and other locations on Cape Cod during the summer months of 1946-1948. Usually nude or donning simple costumes, the artists also used found objects as props to create stark, surreal, and/or erotic images. They passed Margaret’s Leica camera around, taking turns as subject and auteur. This collaborative authorship was reflected in the umbrella name they chose for this work, utilizing the first two letters of their first names: PaJaMa. Read more >
