Jeremy Kost is a tireless chronicler of gender, sexuality, and nightlife, and a pioneer of the Polaroid. Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, he now lives and works in New York City, though he regularly travels the world to capture his images, whether they’re of toned male models in the California desert or vibrant drag queens strutting through Pittsburgh.
This year, Kost’s work will be on view at the Andy Warhol Museum, Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C., and Galerie Nuke in Paris. powerHouse books recently released his first monograph, It’s Always Darkest Before Dawn, featuring salacious and intense portraits and Kost’s elaborate, perspective-bending collages; a limited edition was produced in collaboration with BookMarc.

It’s not hyperbole to suggest that Kost could be a natural heir to Warhol, snapping Polaroids of a thriving subculture of freaks, rebels, trannies, and costumed divas. The artist’s social circle—icons like Amanda Lepore and Ladyfag—are his natural subjects. For Jeremy Kost, everyday life assumes the quality of a flamboyant fairytale. His images are alternately verite and constructed, gritty nightlife realism or staged and choreographed fantasies. And Kost has been pushing the envelope, experimenting with ever more ambitious projects. (by Scott Indrisek)

Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall
Curator’s Essay by Eric C. Shiner regarding “Not a Play Area”, 2007

Beauty and poise in all of their many guises are ever-present in the photgraphs of Jeremy Kost. So, too, are their polar opposites–those traits that they long to cover, eradicate or deflect–ugliness and insecurity. The two binarisms go hand-in-hand, much like a dark queen peering into her mirror and questioning the perceived beauty of her refl ection, the delicate poise she has practiced again and again. And in Jeremy Kost’s Polaroids that capture the underworld of New York City’s club scene, the “other” world of fame and celebrity, and indeed, the exalted world of beatiful go-go boys and sideshow freaks, the queen in the image is not necessarily that of Walt Disney’s doing, but instead an outlandish persona who represents the beauty and ugliness in us all. KostÕs Polaroids become the ultimate Warholian mirror of that which we desire, that which we fear, and that which we will never be.

And in just the same vein as Warhol, who rarely left home without his trusty Polaroid camera hung ’round his neck, Kost inhabits the realm of the modern day club kid, the glamorous drag queen, the young starlet and the rock n’ roll jet setter as though he were one with them, no matter their stripes, no batter their extremes. As though a social chameleon flung off the wall, Kost melds with his surroundings by building trust with his subjects–telling them with a smile or a nod that they are indeed the most beautiful of all. The repertoire he builds with his chosen models presents itself in each intimate portrait that he captures with the push of a button. Whether a celebutante veiled in a puff of cigarette smoke or a drag queen checking her make-up in a compact mirror, the figures represented in Kost’s photographs are real, yet at the same time completely fictional. They force us to question aspects of fantasy, privacy and facade. They force us to look into the mirror, and decide for ourselves who we are and who we want to be. They make us question our own beauty, at times confirming our domi-nance, at others exposing our flaws. Jeremy Kost’s powerful images, it seems, are the perfect conduit for these self-examinations. For him, beauty lies only in the eye of the Polaroider.