is available in both hardcover and softcover.
Photographing the Invasion of the Pines is like falling through a rabbit hole and finding yourself in a world that is unlike any you ever have seen. It is a wondrous experience, full of joy and passion, captured beautifully over the years in Kravitz’s black & white and color photographs. While celebrating the uniqueness of the Cherry Grove community, these images also highlight the importance of human rights and freedom of expression for the LGBTQIA+ community worldwide.
Kravitz’s photography book has received numerous favorable critical reviews.
-Taylor Mac
American actor, playwright, performance artist, director, producer, and singer-songwriter and 2017 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant.”
Mascara, Mirth & Mayhem: Independence Day on Fire Island by photographer Susan Kravitz is a collection of Invasion of the Pines photographs taken over the past four decades in the LGBTQ community of Cherry Grove, Fire Island, NY.
It’s a book about journeys.
The first journey was undertaken by a fearless few who boarded a water taxi in 1976 to protest discrimination against a Cherry Grove drag queen in the neighboring community of Fire Island Pines.
Another is the journey that reflects the gay movement itself, from the fearful, AIDS-ridden years of the 1980s and 1990s to the joyous years of this decade, when LGBTQ people are out and proud and, if they choose, legally married.
This book is also about my own journey—initially, as a married woman who, in 1979, came to visit Cherry Grove one rainy afternoon, and then as a lesbian, who returned with camera in hand a couple of years later to begin photographing for the next 45 years in this extraordinary community.
My photographs are as much about the times in which they were taken as they are about the people who populate them.
Ultimately, they are about human rights and freedom of expression seen through the lens of the Invasion. For some, the Invasion of the Pines is remembered as a political event, one that ranks with Stonewall as a time when gay people in Cherry Grove stood up for themselves.
For many others, it is a day of high camp and great fun. In the end, it’s a day to be free, to be whoever you want to be, and to be gay.