NYT's Bob Morris Headlines Giard Benefit in Sagaponack

The Robert Giard Foundation, which supports artists exploring gender issues and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer experience, will host a benefit on Sept. 17 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation in Sagaponack. Bob Morris, a contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications, a Lambda Literary Award-winner, and a novelist whose most recent work is “Bobby Wonderful: An Imperfect Son Buries His Parents,” will be the guest of honor and speaker.

The foundation, established in honor of the late Robert Giard, an Amagansett photographer whose book, “Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers,” paired black-and-white portraits with selections of writers’ work, awards a $7,500 annual fellowship to artists working on a project in photography, photo-based media, film, video, or moving image that addresses issues of sexuality, gender, or LGBTQ identity.

Before his death in 2002, Mr. Giard had made almost 600 portraits of writers from the East End and across America. “It’s a commitment to making gay lives visible,” said Jonathan Silin, who was Mr. Giard’s longtime partner, from his house in Amagansett last week, speaking of both Mr. Giard’s work and the foundation’s annual fellowship. 

Mr. Silin said that he believes the fellowship award is the largest of its kind. There were more than 120 applicants for this year’s award from around the world, he said, including artists hailing from South America, Europe, and Africa. 

“Our recipients have been a really diverse group,” Mr. Silin said. The current fellow, for instance, Leonard Suryajaya, is a second-generation Chinese and Indonesian artist who grew up in Indonesia, where there have been a number of antigay incidents. He “does incredible color photographs in which he often uses his family,” Mr. Silin said. 

The 2014 fellow, Ka-Man Tse, hails from Hong Kong and documented gay and lesbian life there. “The diversity is quite amazing,” Mr. Silin said. 

The fellowships are administered by the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York. Recipients return to make a presentation following their year of work.

Mr. Morris will give an informal talk at the fund-raiser next week. In past years, guests at the Giard Foundation events have included Mark Doty, a National Book Award-winning poet, and Edward Albee, the playwright who founded a retreat center for writers and visual artists in Montauk, who, said Mr. Silin, “made an impassioned plea for the importance of small arts foundations in a time of cutbacks.” 

In 2013, Tony Kushner, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” was the speaker; the next year it was another Pulitzer winner, Michael Cunningham, the author of “The Hours.” Mr. Cunningham also used the occasion to discuss the importance of small arts foundations such as the Giard Foundation and their impact on emerging artists, discussing a grant he received when he was working as a waiter and never thought he would achieve a writing career. “From then on he was moving forward,” Mr. Silin said. Mr. Cunningham underscored the way the grant “legitimized” him as an artist. 

When he established the foundation in his late partner’s memory, said Mr. Silin, his goal was to provide grants that would give artists the financial support they need to dedicate a period of time to their work. “But I didn’t realize the lasting, nonmonetary value of what a small foundation could do in somebody’s creative life.”

Blanche Wiesen Cook, a history professor and Eleanor Roosevelt biographer, and Clare Coss, a playwright, are supporters of the foundation and were guests of honor at a Giard Foundation spring event this year in New York City. 

“I’m amazed about how a determined group of people have made this thing work and grow,” Mr. Silin said last week. Support this year of the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation, which is helping to underwrite the fund-raiser, leverages the ability of each small foundation to make a difference, he said. 

Besides the support of other artists documenting gay, lesbian, and other lifestyles, the foundation was founded to preserve Mr. Giard’s photographic legacy. His photographs are still widely seen and used; Mr. Silin gets numerous requests each year regarding the portraits. A new biography about the late poet Adrienne Rich will include Mr. Giard’s photos of her, and works are to be added to the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York. Mr. Giard’s entire archive was acquired in 2014 by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale.

“The way the work stays alive,” he said, “is really the best” memorial to Mr. Giard.

Mr. Giard worked to capture images of artists in their own environments and create honest portrayals of them. Mr. Doty said this week that the Giard photograph of him is his favorite; the photographer had an “appreciative curiosity,” he said in 2014, and a “receptivity.” 

“When I step back I am deeply gratified by the way that Bob’s portraits, made in our tiny darkroom in Amagansett, are being seen by more and more people — in books and museums, online, and in the media,” Mr. Silin wrote in an email this week. “His work, making LGBTQ lives visible, is carried on in wonderful ways by the Giard Fellows. Daily, as he wrote, viewers around the world are saying to themselves, ‘These people were here; like me, they lived and breathed. So too will the portraits . . . respond, “We were here, we existed. This is how we were.” ’ ” Tickets to the benefit are $125, or $250 for sponsors, and can be purchased online at nycharities.org.