Justin Vivian Bond in Cherry Grove, Fire Island | koitz Photography
Justin Vivian Bond in Cherry Grove, Fire Island
Portraits by koitz documenting queer performance, identity, and LGBTQ+ life on Fire Island
Justin Vivian Bond photographed by queer photographer koitz in Cherry Grove, Fire Island, New York, in a portrait that brings together performance, identity, queer culture, and the history of one of America's most distinctive LGBTQ+ communities.
For koitz, photographing people in Cherry Grove is about more than making portraits. It is also a way of documenting the people, places, personalities, and moments that have shaped queer life on Fire Island over generations.
Justin Vivian Bond and the Art of Performance
Justin Vivian Bond is an acclaimed American performer, singer, actor, and writer whose career has crossed cabaret, theater, music, film, and performance art.
Bond is particularly known for the character Kiki DuRane, created with Kenny Mellman in the legendary performance duo Kiki and Herb. Their work has become an important part of contemporary queer performance culture, combining music, humor, theatricality, and an often fearless approach to gender and identity.
Photographing Bond in Cherry Grove brings together two powerful aspects of queer culture: performance and place.
The portrait captures an individual artist while also placing that artist within a community with its own long history of LGBTQ+ creativity and self-expression.
Cherry Grove, Fire Island
Cherry Grove is a historic LGBTQ+ community on Fire Island, New York. For decades, it has been a gathering place for LGBTQ+ people, artists, performers, and creatives seeking community and a space for self-expression.
The island's distinctive combination of relative isolation, natural beauty, summer culture, and queer community has helped make Cherry Grove an important part of LGBTQ+ history in the United States.
For a photographer such as koitz, the location is an essential part of the portrait.
The setting carries its own meaning. A photograph made in Cherry Grove is connected to the people who have lived there, visited there, performed there, and helped create its unique cultural identity.
koitz and Queer Photography
Basque-American photographer koitz, based in New York City since 1994, has spent more than two decades photographing LGBTQIA+ life in New York and on Fire Island.
His photographic practice moves between documentary photography, portraiture, and fine art. He has photographed artists, writers, performers, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, creating an evolving visual record of queer life.
His work is particularly connected to Fire Island, where photography becomes both personal portraiture and cultural documentation.
The photographs preserve faces and personalities, but they also preserve a sense of place.
Portrait as Cultural Record
A portrait can tell us something about an individual, but it can also tell us something about the time and place in which that photograph was made.
In Justin Vivian Bond in Cherry Grove, Fire Island, the individual and the community become part of the same visual story.
Bond's history as a performer and their connection to queer performance culture resonate with the history of Cherry Grove itself—a place where artists and LGBTQ+ communities have long created their own spaces for expression, celebration, and belonging.
The photograph therefore operates on several levels: as a portrait, as a document of queer culture, and as part of a larger photographic archive of Fire Island.
Photographing Queer Life on Fire Island
koitz’s Fire Island photographs are part of an ongoing project documenting LGBTQ+ life through the people and places that define it.
Rather than treating queer culture as something separate from everyday life, his photographs show it through portraits, gatherings, landscapes, performances, friendships, and individual moments.
This approach gives the work both a personal and historical dimension.
Each photograph becomes a small record of a larger story.
About koitz
koitz is a queer photographer who has lived and worked in New York City since 1994. His work explores identity, portraiture, performance, queer culture, and LGBTQIA+ life through documentary and fine-art photography.
For more than two decades, he has documented LGBTQIA+ communities in New York City and on Fire Island. His first monograph, koitz Gay Fire Island (2020), was recognized by curator Elizabeth Avedon as one of the year's best photography books.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and the Cherry Grove Community House on Fire Island. Together with filmmaker Parker Sargent, koitz co-directed the award-winning documentary In the Meat Rack (2023).
koitz lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Photographs Information
Subject: Justin Vivian Bond
Location: Cherry Grove, Fire Island, New York
Photographer: koitz
Genre: Queer portrait photography / fine art photography / documentary photography
Subject matter: LGBTQ+ culture, performance, identity, Fire Island
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Photography by koitz