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’s much more enticing, engaging, exciting, because it is so complex.” Papageorge is drawn to formally challenging scrums, which his photos transform into theatrical vignettes or semi-abstractions: in addition to Studio 54, he has photographed in sports arenas, Central Park, and the Acropolis.

The photographer Lisa Kereszi, who organized the new show, is the assistant director in photography at the Yale School of Art, where Papageorge served as director of graduate studies in photography from 1979 to 2013. According to MOCA CT, a staggering forty-one of Papageorge’s M.F.A. students went on to receive Guggenheim Fellowships, and prints of some of their grad-school work, as well as a looping slideshow of photos by almost three hundred of Papageorge’s other students, will be featured in a concurrent show at MOCA CT titled “In the Pool.” The name refers to a renovated former swimming pool at Yale, in which classes and photo critiques are held. Also, Kereszi likes to compare being an art student to “doing laps, over and over—you have crits, over and over, and you get better and better. You know, sink or swim.”