This episode of Foam Talks is about photographer Matthew Leifheit’s fascination for Fire Island. The historic gay retreat on this island is located less than 50 miles from New York City. Leifheit’s project To Die Alive captures the contemporary queer culture of the island.

The conversation with podcast host Mirjam Kooiman will dive into the story of Fire Island and its history.

The special guest of this episode will be Allen Frame. Allen is a photographer and writer, and has written the portfolio text about Matthew’s work in Foam Magazine.

The episode is part of the programme of the Queer History Month 2021, an initiative of IHLIA LGBT Heritage, an international archive and documentation centre on homosexuality, bisexuality and transgender based in Amsterdam.

About the speakers:

Matthew Leifheit (b. 1988, Chicago, IL) is an American photographer, magazine-editor, publisher, and professor based in Brooklyn, NY. He is Editor-in-Chief of MATTE Magazine, a platform for new ideas in photography founded by Leifheit in 2010. He was formerly the photo director of Vice Magazine, and has written criticism and interviews about art and photography for Aperture, Vice, Art F City, and Time. Leifheit holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, where he was awarded the Richard Benson Prize in 2017. He is currently on faculty at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Mirjam Kooiman (b.1990, Netherlands) is a curator at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, host and co-developer of this series.

Allen Frame is a photographer and writer, represented by Gitterman Gallery in New York. His solo exhibition called Innamorato was presented at Pratt Institute in 2018. He received the Abigail Cohen Rome Prize in Photography from the American Academy in Rome in 2017/2018. Detour, a compilation of Allen’s photographs over a decade, was published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2001.

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