Queer Basque-American journalist and photographer koitz has published his first photography book titled ‘koitz Gay Fire Island”. The book chronicles his work over 14 summers in the two mostly LGBTQ+ communities of Fire Island: Cherry Grove and The Fire Island Pines, and it includes a Foreword by author Patrick Ryan and Introduction by curator Nicholas Davies.
koitz (the k is always small) told Queeguru “I am a journalist and a photographer. Nevertheless, my intention when photographing Fire Island is never to document it in journalistic or academic terms. For a few summers I took photographs for The Fire Island News, one of the two local seasonal newspapers. It was then when I started going to parties and events that offered me the possibility of photographing moments of the kind I had never seen before. I wanted to capture these moments for people -– gay or not — who, like me, had never seen anything like them before.”
Curator Nicholas Davies says that “in koitz’s work, we see contrasts of public and private moments that, in both cases, would have been unimaginable merely years ago. Change can be struggle, as with the ordeal of AIDS and its many still-painful losses, but change can also bring about a new outpouring of creativity and energy like the one that sprang up in Cherry Grove and the Pines – first conceived in silence (most Grove “ladies” were respectably married), later trained in indirection (men dancing together was illegal, for instance, but a conga line at the Blue Whale with a single woman at its end took care of that), then tested in vast sorrow – where today, loyal to their exceptional past and rededicated through adversity to the qualities that have given them their magic, Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines have grown stronger and more self-confident than ever, as koitz’s photographs here so beautifully bear witness.”
FIRE GAY ISLAND BY koltz can be purchased at http://www.gaypinkbook.com/
Labels: 2020, Fire Island, koitz, photographs
