Between the years of 1979 and 1986, American photographer Joanne Mulberg (b. 1954) ventured to Fire Island each summer to photograph the communities of the Pines and Cherry Grove, as part of her larger body of work documenting the physical and cultural landscape of Long Island.

From scenes of the extravagant “Miss Fire Island'' pageant and its fabulous participants to quiet portraits of beach-goers lazing in the afternoon light, Mulburg’s photographs capture the decadence, defiance and joy of the Fire Island community, while maintaining the unmediated aesthetics that defined the New Color movement.

At the time, Mulberg was working as a color printer for Joel Meyerowitz, her former instructor at Cooper Union, who wrote that her work “carries a variety of impulses densely pressed into the slenderness of the photograph. The love of light, the immediacy of a moment, the sudden spirit of humor and withal, a grace that does not injure or deform that which she sees.”