Sink or Swim

Fifty years ago, a glitchy yet terrifying animatronic shark persuaded movie audiences never to go in the water again. Luckily—for the photographer Tod Papageorge, at least—it didn't keep people off the beaches. That same year, 1975, Papageorge was making his way across the country, from New York City, where he'd become known for his 35-mm. street scenes, to Los Angeles, where he'd shoot throngs of sun-dazed, sweat-glazed beachgoers with a clunkier medium-format camera. He made four trips to L.A.'s beaches between 1975 and 1988, and a selection of the resulting black-and-white photographs—detail-rich, often dense, rapturous yet funny tableaux of stripped-down bodies engaged in sport or sprawled on the sand—will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Connecticut through October 26th.

- Emma Allen

Papageorge noted that the 6x9-cm.-format camera was the same kind that Brassaï used to photograph in Paris night clubs, in the thirties and forties; Papageorge would also use it to photograph inside Studio 54. “I just would stand still and pretend I didn't exist,” he recalled. “I would wait and wait until what I felt was a singular moment.” Papageorge, now eighty-four, grew up in coastal Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and he was surprised by what he found in California: “I guess in your imagination you see four or five people wandering around, where in reality it’s piles, crowds of people moving around, so it’