The irreverent humor and mordant social commentary of Fran Lebowitz will kick off a star-studded Labor Day weekend at Guild Hall tonight at 8. Ms. Lebowitz, who began her career as a columnist for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, is the author of two best-selling collections of essays, “Metropolitan Life” and “Social Studies.”

Hosted by Dick Cavett, the evening will feature Ms. Lebowitz’s insights on topics that might include gender, race, gay rights, the media, and her pet peeves. Prime orchestra seats are priced at $150, $145 for Guild Hall members. Orchestra seats are $65 and $63, balcony tickets $50 and $48.

Ben Folds will take the John Drew Theater stage on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Mr. Folds, a singer-songwriter-producer who first found mainstream success as the leader of the platinum-selling Ben Folds Five, has gone on to a successful solo career recording multiple studio albums, a pair of records documenting his renowned live performances, a remix record, and music for film and television.

Holders of prime orchestra tickets, which are priced at $150, $145 for members, may attend a post-performance party and craft beer-tasting, with food and live music, in Guild Hall’s garden. Orchestra seats are $65 and $63, and balcony seats are $50 and $48.

Adam Pascal, an actor, singer, and musician who originated the role of Roger Davis in “Rent,” will perform at the Southampton Arts Center with Larry Edoff, a Grammy-nominated musician, on Saturday at 8 p.m. in “Meandlarry,” the final program of Guild Hall’s Songbook Salon series.

Mr. Pascal, who received for his role in “Rent” a Tony nomination for best actor and Drama League and Obie awards, will perform rearranged and re-imagined Broadway classics, pop and rock hits, and original music. The concert will also include several songs from “Rent,” which won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. Tickets are $60, $58 for Guild Hall members. The $85 V.I.P tickets include a post-performance reception with the artists.

“Stirring the Pot: Conversations With Culinary Celebrities” will conclude for the season on Sunday at 11 a.m. with a conversation between Daniel Boulud and Florence Fabricant. Mr. Boulud, the chef whose culinary empire comprises 15 restaurants on three continents, was born in Lyon, France, and came to the United States in 1982. His flagship restaurant, Daniel in Manhattan, has three Michelin stars and was cited as one of the 10 best restaurants in the world by The International Herald Tribune. A book signing will follow the talk.

Tickets are $15, $13 for members. A limited number of $75 tickets will include a 10 a.m. continental brunch with Mr. Boulud and Ms. Fabricant, a food writer for The New York Times.

Linda Eder will bring her diverse repertoire of show tunes, standards, pop, country, and jazz to the John Drew Theater on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Ms. Eder, who starred on Broadway as Lucy Harris in “Jekyll and Hyde,” for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk award, has established herself as one of today’s most acclaimed interpreters of pop standards and theatrical songs. She has performed for sold-out audiences at such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and Radio City Music Hall, and has been featured in many PBS concert specials.

Prime orchestra tickets at $100. Orchestra seats are priced at $65, $63 for members, while balcony tickets are $55 and $53.

“The Homesman,” a western starring Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones and directed and co-written by Mr. Jones, will be the Centerpiece Film at the 22nd annual Hamptons International Film Festival, taking place from Oct. 9 through Oct. 13. Hilary Swank, the film’s star, will be in East Hampton for the film’s East Coast premiere.

The actor, writer, and director Bob Balaban, who has a house in Bridgehampton, has been named this year’s honorary chairman of the festival.

Adapted from the novel of the same name by Glendon Swarthout, “The Homesman” focuses on a subject seldom highlighted in westerns — the plight of women in the Old West. Hilary Swank portrays Mary Bee Cuddy, a self-sufficient pioneer woman who has taken on the task of transporting three deranged women from Nebraska to Iowa. When she finds George Briggs, played by Mr. Jones, sitting on a horse under a tree with a rope around his neck, she rescues him — on the condition that he accompany her on her journey.

Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter play the three women, all of whom have come unhinged by the rigors and deprivations of life on the plains. The star-studded cast also includes Meryl Streep, James Spader, and John Lithgow.

According to Peter Bradshaw, reviewing the film in The Guardian after its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, “Tommy Lee Jones shows some true storytelling grit in this superbly watchable frontier western; he has a muscular and confident command of narrative, driving the plot onward with a real whip-crack, and easily handles the tonal swings between brutal shock, black comedy, and sentimentality.”

The festival has also announced the titles in its Views From Long Island section, which focuses on local filmmakers and films with geographical ties to the East End. The films will include the pilot of the Showtime production “The Affair,” which explores the effects on two marriages of an extramarital relationship between a New York City schoolteacher and a young waitress, who meet in Montauk. Much of the drama was filmed in and around Amagansett, where some residents objected to the fallout from the large-scale production on their neighborhoods.

Much of Lou Howe’s first feature film, “Gabriel,” was also filmed on the East End. Rory Culkin stars in the title role of a young man longing for stability and happiness while struggling with mental illness. Soon after being released from an asylum, Gabriel obsessively pursues his high school girlfriend, whom he hasn’t seen in years, testing the limits of his family’s understanding.

Views From Long Island will also include the New York premiere of “Diplomacy,” a feature directed by Volker Schlöndorff, an acclaimed German filmmaker who has a house in Amagansett. Set in the summer of 1944, the film focuses on Dietrich von Choltitz, a German general who has been ordered by Hitler to destroy Paris rather than let it fall into enemy hands. Adapted from a play by Cyril Gély, the film details the efforts of Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling to dissuade von Choltitz.

“Weenie,” a short film shot in East Hampton by the Sag Harbor-based filmmaker Dan Roe, will also be included in Views From Long Island. Weenie is a 16-year-old girl who has been grounded. Her mother doesn’t understand her, and her friend is pressuring her to come to a party, so she decides to sneak out. The filmmaker, who teaches at the Ross School, has called the film “a combination of Judy Blume and Alfred Hitchcock.”

A limited number of Founders Passes are available at a 15-percent discount until Monday at hamptonsfilmfest.org. 

While some of us were basking in the sun or sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic to get to the next much-hyped event, Enoc Perez was hard at work in his East Hampton studio on the pieces presented in “Summer Job” at Harper’s Books in East Hampton.

    The frothy riff touches on social media, appropriation, modern art, and, if you’re feeling academic in these lazy dog days, Lacanian notions and related theories of the subject and object of the gaze in art.

    This series has its roots in the artist’s earlier and loftier form of appropriation, namely using elements of Picasso’s compositions in combination with his exploration of the painted nude or on their own. Now, he has taken images from Instagram of minimally dressed women, from amateur selfies to more professional photos, and added collage and his own painted marks. The applied shapes resemble some of Picasso’s own abstracted female forms, the cutouts of Matisse, and even, perhaps with this summer’s Gagosian show of Marcel Duchamp in mind, a group of “Stoppages” in one work.

    Of course, Duchamp’s Dada explorations of collage and readymades were seminal and helped define the form. His rebranding of Mona Lisa postcards and popular advertisements with his own predilection for puns, the off-color joke, and sexual innuendo inspired generations to follow.

    One of the first works in the show, a superimposed “Desmoiselles d’Avignon” on a poster for the Harmony Korine film “Spring Breakers,” serves as a bridge between this higher form of art play and a film that used the nominally clad “Girls Gone Wild” culture as a plot device. The mash-up of women behaving outside of socially acceptable norms then and now is punchy in a way that is more powerful than might immediately be surmised. Its color bath of bloody red suggests violence, menace, and carnal love.

    That crossover work is the heaviest in the show in terms of art historical heft and impact. The others are more playful, coming from a small and more informal book the artist used to plan the series before he turned to the larger works on paper and canvas displayed in the gallery. Yet, it colors those pieces, making them more fraught than their romping beach-y revelry might otherwise suggest.

    Most of the canvas transfers and works on paper were worked out previously, with the cutout shapes predetermined. One inkjet piece on photographic paper is more freestyle, using a few small shapes but taking hints of paint that are found on some of the other works and applying them expressively in wide swathes around and over the figure. Although the splats, splashes, squiggles, and the above-referenced shapes by artists from a prior century are engaging, the wash of paint gives the work a deeper, more substantial feeling. It seems like a natural progression and is reductive in its expansion over the composition, allowing only glimpses of what the artist wants to be seen.

    The cutout shapes may function as a censor’s blue dots or pixelated screens, thwarting our ability to see the original image in its entirety and thereby making it all the more attention-grabbing, casting viewers into the role of voyeur. Not only are the body’s parts or its entirety obscured, but the faces are also always partially or wholly hidden, raising issues of objectification and a hint of malfeasance, the identities hidden to protect the innocent.

    The collaged bits make it into a happy game, playful colors and forms replacing a need for more visual information. With the paint, the artist reminds his audience who is in control. Rather than a frisky gambit, we see a more serious attempt to obscure and confound and a more direct homage to Richard Prince, another one of the artist’s predecessors and inspirations for this series.

    Since all of the works are dated from this year and were completed this summer, the question becomes: Is this where the series came from, or is it where it is going? In his earlier series involving transfers of oil stick drawings of buildings onto canvas, the brushwork he used to embellish them came later on. It would seem that this could be the same case here and a more suitable style for the cooler and more serious months ahead.

    The show will remain on view through Columbus Day.

Hope and fear, tolerance and suspicion, open hearts and wrenching secrets — the human experience plays out in ways both predictable and unforeseen. In tomorrow night’s screening of “The Overnighters,” the final film in the SummerDocs series presented by the Hamptons International Film Festival and Guild Hall, an epic story is told through unemployed, often desperate men, and through the words and deeds of a man who struggles mightily to help them.

Jesse Moss, the director of “The Overnighters,” spent two years “embedded” in the small North Dakota town of Williston, where hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has unlocked a vast oil field in the nearby Bakken shale. There he met and filmed the Rev. Jay Reinke, pastor of Concordia Lutheran Church, and many of the men, and some women, who traveled to the region with high hopes but discovered a sobering reality — enormous competition for work and a scarcity of affordable housing.

Dozens, sometimes scores, of job seekers slept at Concordia Lutheran every night while even more camped in cars and vans in the church’s parking lot. Tirelessly living his faith’s edict to love thy neighbor, Mr. Reinke’s drive to welcome and care for the hundreds of newcomers riled and sometimes infuriated residents of the community, including many members of his congregation. Tension mounted and the local government intervened as the pastor resolutely and, over time, obsessively forged ahead.

The intent, Mr. Moss said last week, was to make “a cinema-verité observation documentary, to really film life as it happened.” Working alone, he himself lived at the church for six months, capturing intimate and powerful moments, both between the pastor and the people seeking his help and in the pastor’s own struggle, an internal conflict that ultimately delivers a seismic and unexpected twist.

“The Overnighters” recalls both “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel of the throngs of dust-bowl Americans driven to seek a better life in California, and the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me,” in which the implications of transnational economic forces play out in individual lives in the Detroit suburb of Flint. Like these works, whether Steinbeck’s realist novel or Mr. Moore’s up-close portrayal of a dying community, “The Overnighters” tells a story much larger than the sum of its individual parts.

“Jay was very comfortable in front of the camera,” Mr. Moss said. “As a pastor, Jay is a performer in a way — he’s used to being in front of people. Also, many of these people coming to Williston had risked so much, and were very open as a way of surviving.” Living among them, he said, “I felt part of that community. You try to repay the trust and intimacy you’re given by making a truthful, honest, compassionate film.”

The extent to which Mr. Reinke was willing to help strangers — “to love thy neighbor, even when he is an ex-con,” Mr. Moss said — and even as members of the congregation, community, and government turned against him, was striking. “These men are hard to love, and he took them in,” he said. “I could tell he had put himself in opposition to his congregation and neighbors, and that things might not turn out well. In a sense, the men were his true congregation. I found his choice to be universally moral — that’s what resonated with me.”

Like many scenes in “The Overnighters,” the climactic twist unfolded spontaneously, Mr. Moss said. “It does leave the audience with some questions. There are ambiguities and complexities. What makes Jay’s decisions, particularly with regard to helping these men, morally profound is they’re not black and white, they’re shades of gray. Jay exists, as we all do, on that continuum of gray. That’s okay, that’s part of grappling with complexities.”

“The Overnighters” premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Intuitive Filmmaking. The film was also honored with the Golden Gate Award for best feature documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize at the Miami International Film Festival, and the Inspiration Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Drafthouse Films will release “The Overnighters” in theaters in the fall.

The Hamptons International Film Festival’s SummerDocs screening of “The Overnighters” happens tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. Alec Baldwin will host, and a question-and-answer session with special guests will follow. Tickets are $23, $21 for Guild Hall members, and are available at the box office or online at guildhall.org.

Susie Essman, a stand-up comedian for 25 years who rocketed to fame as the profane Susie Greene during seven seasons of Larry David’s comedy series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” will take the stage at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor Monday at 8 p.m.

The Los Angeles Times called Ms. Essman “the most lyrical purveyor of profanity on television,” and The New York Times lauded her as “one of the most vivid characters in the show.”  She has also appeared in her own half-hour HBO comedy special and has made numerous visits to “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” “The View,” and “Crank Yankers,” to name just a few of her many television credits.

Few tickets remain; a visit to baystreet.org will provide the latest information on availability.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill is presenting “Surf Movie Night, Vol. 2,” an outdoor screening of noncommercial surf films, tomorrow at 8 p.m. The short films were selected by Michael Halsband, a photographer and filmmaker, Mike Solomon, an artist, and Tyler Breuer, a producer and promoter of surf films. Tickets are $10, free for members, students, and children. Attendees have been advised to bring chairs and blankets. In the event of rain, the event will take place on the museum’s covered terrace.

On Sunday from 4 to 6 p.m., the museum will launch a new annual series, “By Design: Innovators in Art and Fashion in Conversation,” a symposium that will focus on the relationship between visual art and design. Edward Nardoza, editor-in-chief of Women’s Wear Daily, will moderate a discussion with the artist Ross Bleckner, who has been exhibiting internationally for 40 years, and Calvin Klein, the acclaimed fashion designer.

“By Design” is a fund-raiser for the museum’s year-round initiatives. Tickets, at $200, $150 for members, are available at parrishart.org.

Guild Hall is steaming toward Labor Day weekend with a jam-packed schedule of programs ranging from comedy to new music to rock ’n’ roll to film. A staged reading of “Night With Oscar,” a new comedy by the Emmy-nominated writer Eugene Pack, will start things off tonight at 8. The play, set in a Long Island town on Oscar night, stars Tony Danza, Anita Gillette, Tate Donovan, Gina Gershon, Dayle Reyfel, Lucy DeVito, and John Mangaro. Tickets are $30, $28 for members. Prime orchestra seats and a V.I.P. reception are available for $75 and $70.

“Celebrity Autobiography,” a long-running New York comedy, will arrive at Guild Hall with new material tomorrow, with performances at 7 and 9:30 p.m. Created by Mr. Pack and Mr. Reyfel, both of whom will appear in the show, it features Alec Baldwin, Christie Brinkley, Mr. Danza, Tovah Feldshuh, Susan Lucci, Ralph Macchio, Jerry O’Connell, and Rebecca Romijn acting out superstar memoirs onstage. Tickets are $40, $38 for members, with prime orchestra seats priced at $65 and $63.

Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble will perform a quartet concert Saturday at 8 p.m. Ms. Monk is a composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer whose multidisciplinary works combine music, theater, and dance. Known for her vocal innovations, she formed the ensemble in 1978 to explore new and wider vocal textures and forms. Orchestra seats are $50, $48 for members, balcony tickets are $40 and $38, and prime orchestra, $75 and $70.

Classic rock ’n’ roll will be on the menu Monday night at 8 when the Hit Men, five veteran musicians who worked with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Tommy James and the Shondells, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, Elton John, and Jim Croce, will perform a smorgasbord of hits, including “Sherry,” “Oh What a Night,” “Peace Train,” “Crocodile Rock,” and many more. Orchestra tickets are $60 and $58, balcony seats are $40 and $38, and prime orchestra costs $75 and $70.

The comedian, actor, and writer Rob Schneider, a performer on “Saturday Night Live” for four seasons, will bring his self-deprecating humor and goofball antics to the John Drew Theater on Tuesday at 8 p.m. Mr. Schneider moved from stand-up and television to film in the mid-1990s. He starred in and co-wrote “Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo,” has directed two features, and has appeared in many films from Adam Sandler’s production company. Tickets are $65 and $63, $45 and $43 in the balcony, and $100 and $95 up close.

“Herb & Dorothy 50x50,” a documentary that continues the story of a postal worker and a librarian who amassed an important collection of cutting-edge contemporary art, will be screened on Wednesday evening at 8. The Vogels launched a project with the National Gallery of Art that gave 2,500 artworks to museums in all 50 states. In 2012, after the death of Mr. Vogel, his wife closed their collection and has since been creating a tribute to their unique partnership. The film will be followed by a conversation between Ms. Vogel and Ruth Appelhof, Guild Hall’s director. Tickets are $12, $10 for members.

“An Evening With Fran Lebowitz,” hosted by Dick Cavett, will take place next Thursday at 8 p.m., followed on Friday, Aug. 29, at 7:30 p.m. by SummerDocs #4, the Hamptons Film Festival program, hosted by Alec Baldwin.   

Why, you might reasonably ask, should you give space in your garden to a plant that is found all around us?

Fragrance, that is why, and summersweet, or sweet pepperbush, Clethra alnifolia, has it in abundance. It is spicy, somewhat reminiscent of cloves and cinnamon, and a light breeze casts its perfume over a large area.

Clethra would deserve space in the garden even if we spent our August days chasing its scent walking, biking, or tooling in an open car in Northwest, Springs, and Napeague, where it grows along the roadside, mostly on the damp, shady side.

What could be more idyllic than whiling away long August days encased in a bubble of intoxicating fragrance? It commandeers attention, dominating conversation, or, if you are alone, wafting you into a reverie.

The shrub itself is rather modest, with dark green leaves. Its flowers are packed into spires, often clusters of spires, ranging from white to pink. It can bloom from mid-July through August, with some late-flowering cultivars opening in September. Its natural habitat is along the coast from Nova Scotia to Florida and the Gulf Coast to Texas.

Sad to say, the sweet pepperbush is grazed by deer, no matter what the catalogues say. Otherwise it is an easy, disease-free, and adaptable plant for the landscape and garden. Plants can grow to 10 feet and higher, although dwarf and compact cultivars have been introduced recently.

Clethra also suckers, which can be turned to an advantage. For many years a thicket screened off the view of my woodland garden. When the bushes grew too tall, they were easily cut back. Clethra accommodatingly flowers on the current year’s wood so it can be pruned almost any time without sacrificing flowers. If you do not want a thicket or grove, the suckers are easily clipped out.

This year I was ready for a change. I’ve been experimenting with various ways of increasing the depth of view in the garden, creating small vignettes.  The bark of clethra, mottled with bright silver, draws the eye. Why not eliminate all but four or five trunks on each bush and limb them up to about four feet? Eureka, the bushes have been transformed from a solid wall into interesting architectural shapes. More important, the silver on the trunks directs the eye toward the woodland garden to the rear, taking in various textures and glimpses of color. What better way to coax visitors toward the path, to explore what lies beyond?

There is nothing inferior about the straight species of Clethra alnifolia.  In fact, one that had been left at my house in a pot years ago is superior to some of the named varieties I grow.  However, clethra can be leggy and sprawling, so if you purchase a named variety you will know its form in advance. 

Many of us on the East End grow, whether we know it or not, C. alnifolia Compacta, which was favored and propagated by Jim Cross, founder of the now-closed Environmentals Nursery on the North Fork. It is denser than the species, and onNorth Fork. It is denser than the species, and only recently, after more than 20 years, have I begun pruning it to keep it under seven feet high.

A number of new cultivars have been introduced recently. A low-growing (maturing to about three feet high), round and compact plant with long, showy racemes of flowers, Crystalina, comes from Dr. Thomas Ranney, one of the best ornamental plant developers working in the U.S. today.

Unless you need a low-growing clethra that suckers profusely, I’d avoid Hummingbird. My only experience with 16 Candles, another low-growing compact bush, was unfortunate. We used it to underplant the white crepe myrtles on Abby Jane’s Path at LongHouse Reserve, and they were destroyed during the winter by deer. So much for slyly introducing fragrance to a planting of crepe myrtles.

Rare Find Nursery is offering a cultivar named Bumblebee, which matures to about three feet and is said to sucker minimally.

Perhaps my favorite of the white cultivars is Anne Bidwell. Its upright, densely clustered spikes of flowers make it unmistakable. The flowers do not open at the same time, so each spike is a combination of tight buds and open blooms, reminding me of an old lace pattern.

The most popular and probably best of the pink-flowered clethra is Ruby Spice. Discovered and introduced by Broken Arrow Nursery in Hamden, Conn., it has received a number of horticultural awards and is widely available. Enough said.

Whether you are caught up in the vogue for native plants or not, the sweet pepperbush deserves a place in every summer garden.

The late Robert Giard, a photographer and longtime Amagansett resident, began making portraits of gay and lesbian writers in 1985 after seeing “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s play about the AIDS crisis. By the end of the evening, he wrote in the introduction to a 1997 book in which a number of the photos were collected, he had decided that his work “should be of use to other gay people by recording something of note about our experience, our history, and our culture.”

Before his death in 2002, Mr. Giard had made almost 600 portraits of East End writers such as Edward Albee, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Clare Coss, Lanford Wilson, and Suzanne Gardinier, and others from across the United States, from Adrienne Rich to Marion Zimmer Bradley, Allen Ginsberg, Andrew Dworkin, and Mr. Kramer.

Jonathan Silin, Mr. Giard’s partner of 30 years, founded the Robert Giard Foundation in the weeks immediately following his partner’s death. “I was concerned that his work, which was so historically important . . . I wanted those portraits to be kept safely and be administered properly,” he said last week.

The foundation will hold its first East End fund-raiser in Springs on Sunday, with Mark Doty, a poet and memoirist whose work has earned a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and a National Book Award, as the guest of honor.

In “Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers,” published by M.I.T. Press, each of Mr. Giard’s black-and-white prints is paired with a selection of the writer’s work, chosen with their collaboration.

The book served as a companion volume to a 1998 photo exhibition of the same name at the New York Public Library, which acquired many of the portraits for its collection.

Mr. Giard and Mr. Silin both taught at Southampton College for a time — Mr. Giard as a photography teacher and Mr. Silin as an education professor. Both were familiar sights, riding their bikes everywhere around town.

The couple began renting a house in Amagansett in 1971, and moved there full time in 1974.

“Whenever I wasn’t teaching and could come up with the money — and sometimes even when I couldn’t — I traveled to photograph for the series,” Mr. Giard wrote in his book. “Often I felt like Mercury, bearing greetings, gossip, and opinions across time and space from one member of the writers’ community to another.”

Mr. Giard never learned to drive and would haul his knapsack full of film and equipment across the country on public transportation, becoming acquainted with a writer he would visit in one geographical area and often then expanding his contacts and subjects through a network of their acquaintances and friends. He died on a bus en route to Chicago at age 62, of an apparent heart attack.

He was “a little bit of a medieval troubadour,” Mr. Silin said last week, “going from one person to another.”

“He managed to gain access to many communities,” he said, meeting and photographing Native American, Latino, and African-American writers, and those who were still not openly gay. “He was able to gain trust through his connectedness and his respect for their work.”

At the beginning of his project, when he told people he had so far photographed 30 gay or lesbian writers, they expressed surprise. “You mean there are more?” he said people asked him.

In 2004, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale acquired from Mr. Silin Mr. Giard’s entire archive, including, according to the library’s website, “more than 1,500 vintage prints, 7,800 related work prints, and extensive correspondence, records, diaries, and other papers.”

Mr. Giard “kept copious diaries,” Mr. Silin said, in which he recorded all of his interactions with every one of his subjects. He made notes about the writers’ work, his visits to them, their sittings, and about his photographic printing process. He began his work with each writer with a careful reading of his or her oeuvre.

He was known for his masterful darkroom work and for his South Fork landscape photos. Mr. Giard was also commissioned to photograph the 321 women who had received grants from the Thanks Be to Grandmother Winifred Foundation established by Deborah Ann Light, who was also an Amagansett resident, and was working on that project at the time of his death.

After securing Mr. Giard’s archive, Mr. Silin said, the foundation arranged a traveling exhibit of the photographer’s prints, and then established its fellowship program.

Six artists, or collaborators, working in photography, video, or film in areas addressing sexuality and gender identity have so far received the foundation’s annual award of $7,500.

The award, one of the largest in its field, draws up to 80 applicants a year and, said Mr. Silin, is particularly important “because there’s so little government money for arts funding, particularly in these areas that are considered by some to be controversial.”

In conjunction with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in New York City, it is given to those considered outside the mainstream, without other major sources of funding or institutional affiliations. Yearly applications are due on Nov. 15, and information is provided on the foundation’s website, at robertgiardfoundation.org.

Mr. Giard, said Mr. Silin, “was always outside the mainstream, in terms of funding. He always had his own vision and commitment, and he didn’t let anything stop him.”

The current fellow, Ka-Man Tse, a photographer and video artist based in New York who is working on a series of large-format photographs featuring subjects in the Hong Kong L.G.B.T.Q. community, said in an e-mail that the award “is an incredible platform to continue the dialogue and momentum . . . through storytelling and image making.”

“We’re hoping to be able to give out more fellowships and increase our reach,” Mr. Silin said. The foundation’s annual fund-raiser provides the fellowship money. It will be held at Sue Shapiro’s residence on Gerard Drive in Springs from 5 to 7 p.m. Sponsor tickets are $250; others are $125. They can be purchased through the foundation website.

Mr. Giard photographed Mr. Doty in Provincetown, Mass., in 1992. On a drive together to Provincetown, the two had a “long, very engrossing, quiet, engaged conversation,” Mr. Doty recalled over the weekend at his house in Springs. It was about the time when his collection “My Alexandria” was published, and Mr. Giard had read it, and his other work, “very closely,” Mr. Doty said.

The poet has been photographed often, by a number of well-known and accomplished photographers. But, he said, the portrait Mr. Giard took of him, which was used on the jacket of “My Alexandria,” is a favorite.

In the picture, taken in the foyer of Mr. Doty’s Provincetown house, the entire setting — the writer, the wood of the walls, the leaves of a hanging plant, and the spines of the books in a bookcase — is painted with silver light, Mr. Doty said.

Mr. Giard’s approach “was very gentle,” Mr. Doty said. “Sometimes people read your work and assume they know you.” Mr. Giard “wasn’t like that.” The photographer had an “appreciative curiosity,” he said, seeking insight “both into my background and into my thinking.” Mr. Giard’s pictures are “not about the photographer’s idea of you, but about receptivity.”

“I felt I could just be totally open with him, and relax into the lens. What is better than the sense of people being really, truly interested in you . . . without self-interest?” he asked. “What better quality in a photographer, than to make you feel known and knowable? You want to open yourself to be known, or relax enough to be known.”

“Bob was kind of a natural psychologist, without any training,” Mr. Silin said. “He related with all sorts of people, from all walks of life, and he could make them feel comfortable.”

At the time he was photographed by Mr. Giard, Mr. Doty said, two things were happening. The gay and lesbian community was increasing in size and scope. “Things were being mapped; communities were being described, were being made visible,” he said, and a literary community was coalescing.

  At the same time, as the number of H.I.V. and AIDS cases became known, there was a “feeling of being imperiled,” said Mr. Doty, who wrote about the loss of his partner to AIDS in his memoirs, “Heaven’s Coast” and “Dog Years,” and a book of poetry, “Atlantis.”

A lack of answers from the medical and scientific community added to the unease. In the face of what was happening, Mr. Doty said, people felt that “now is the time to inscribe your experience; show it to the world.”

“People were dying,” Mr. Silin said, and Mr. Giard felt compelled to create his photographic document “under the pressure of AIDS . . . this sense of being part of a vulnerable culture in a vulnerable world.”

Leafing through his copy of “Particular Voices” at his dining table on Sunday, Mr. Doty paused a moment to ponder pictures of this or that acquaintance or friend. It’s “startling,” he said, to look at the faces now, decades later, of those who are now older, or, in some cases, gone.

Ten years into the project, in his book’s introduction, Mr. Giard said that in reviewing the archive, “I find myself looking at a slice of literary and social history.”

“The integrity that he brought to that process,” the poet said of Mr. Giard, “has resulted in this legacy. It’s hauntingly beautiful work.”

Mr. Doty, who is a distinguished professor and writer-in-residence at Rutgers University, said he is honored to be “joining a list of wonderful and very acclaimed writers” recognized by the Giard foundation.

As if the cause itself wasn’t worthy enough, the fact that the legendary Lou Reed played at the first fund-raiser for the landscape designer Edwina von Gal’s Azuero Earth Project in 2012 definitely made people stand up and take notice of the tiny organization working predominantly in rural Panama.

Two years later, the equally legendary Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, will be the special guest at a Labor Day weekend benefit picnic at Cindy Sherman’s house in Springs for the Azuero Project and the Perfect Earth Project, an initiative Ms. von Gal is leading to promote toxin-free lawn and landscape care closer to home.

Though different in focus, the two efforts rise from the same principles: that reducing chemical use and nurturing the land — whether it be a farm in Panama or a backyard in Sagaponack — in a way that works with nature, not against it, is ultimately better for the individual, the community, and the world.

“We are what I call ‘rational naturalists.’ Whatever it takes to get someone to ease into the program is fine with us,” Ms. von Gal said on Friday at her home office in Springs. In other words, while she envisions a more “perfect earth,” she realizes that it will take time and lot of education to approach that vision, hence the Perfect Earth initiative.

In Panama, where Ms. von Gal owns land on the Azuero Peninsula, her nonprofit works to preserve biodiversity and encourage healthier agricultural methods that will allow rural farmers to sustain their land and their communities well into the future.

With a large and influential client list here in the United States, it made sense that she would eventually bring a similar message back home, but focused instead on lawns and landscapes.

“I never paid much attention to the lawn,” she said. Going chemical-free had never been a priority on the properties she designed, but she had always “used plants that I didn’t think were so chemically dependent.” Her style is natural, serene, rarely formal, and her designs are sought after by a who’s who of clients and architects — she was in Panama originally to design the park for a museum of biodiversity designed by the famed architect Frank Gehry. (The museum had its “soft” opening last month, but the park has not yet been funded.)

On her early visits, she was introduced to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. “They were our science advisory team,” she said. “I met all these amazing scientists that were creating the science that measures global warming.”

“That’s how I actually began to do something about what I felt strongly about for years but was always too busy with landscape designing to do,” she said. “I always figured I plant enough trees to go to heaven.”

The Azuero Peninsula, where she bought land, is an arid, primarily agricultural region that has been heavily deforested for cattle farming.

“The dregs of the outdated chemicals of the world are being dumped on them,” she said Friday. Farmers there had been using outdated methods brought to them by outsiders. “They don’t have the old seeds anymore and they don’t know the old methods. Their soils are destroyed by chemicals and poor farming techniques . . . compacted by overgrazing,” she said.

They were aware that current practices weren’t working, they could see the effects of climate change firsthand, and because of this “they were really inspired to find a better way to farm.” Some of that involves looking back to old seed varieties, to pre-chemical methods, and some involves looking forward, using cutting-edge science to fix the soil and rebuilding it by planting trees and other resilient crops.

The Azuero Earth Project opened its office in Panama in early 2004. “We run on a shoestring, but basically due to the generosity of our donors . . . we can do a lot,” Ms. von Gal said. “We get these young, amazing scientists that come down to do thesis work. They build our science base and act as wonderful emissaries to the community.”

The peninsula is “a small enough place that I felt I could really make a difference,” she said.

“About two years ago, I said to all my clients, ‘How would you feel if we just took all of your properties toxin-free?’ ” Some of them were surprised that was not already the case. All of them said yes. “If their landscaping staff didn’t have the experience, we brought in people to assist them.”

“What we say is that you’re exchanging chemical inputs for intelligent input. . . . To my mind it’s more ineresting, understanding the lifecycle of plants. . . . That’s the connection to Panama: There’s no future in continuing to use chemicals because the more you use, the more you need, and they kill everything else.”

Perfect Earth is collaborating with the Peconic Land Trust to create an information and education center at its Bridge Gardens property in Bridgehampton. As part of that collaboration, Paul Wagner of Treewise is offering free advice on solving lawn and landscape problems without toxins every Thursday from noon to 4 p.m. through October.

“Lawns use two to four times as many chemicals as agriculture does,” Ms. von Gal said. To have what she calls a “PRFCT lawn,” people should seed, fertilize, and aerate in the fall, rather than the spring. Second, they should keep grass 31/2 to 4 inches high so it develops deeper roots. “If you cut the grass too short, you have to water it every day. Short grass allows the sun to hit the soil, which dries it out.”

“There are 118 landscape chemicals now being found in the Long Island aquifer,” she said. Drinking water quality is hugely important. “We’re saying, before you even get that far, do you know what it’s doing to your pets, to your children? People respond much better when it’s personal.”

She hopes to see this logic applied not only to home lawns, but to school campuses, playing fields, public parks, and even golf courses.

“I like to believe that someday when people see these really short-cut monoculture lawns, they’ll be suspicious of them,” Ms. von Gal said.

“We can make a huge difference in a very short period of time with actually a reduction of cost,” she said. “And if your landscaper doesn’t know how, do not get a new person, send them to us.”

The tastemakers and trendsetters in Ms. von Gal’s circle of clients and friends could well help turn the tide, making doing the right thing for the environment the “in” thing to do.

In addition to Ms. Sherman, the well-known photographer hosting the Aug. 30 picnic, the host committee this year includes Laurie Anderson, Nan Bush and Bruce Weber, Kim Cattrall, Blythe Danner, Calvin Klein, and Rufus Wainwright, who is also one of the musical guests. The musical lineup, under the direction of Jenni Muldaur, also includes the Persuasions, G.E. Smith, and Teddy Thompson.

Tickets to the benefit, billed as a family picnic, cost $100 for children and start at $1,000 for adults or $250 for those 35 or under.

Limited-edition platters by the artists Robert Longo and Billy Sullivan will be sold at the benefit and online for $650 apiece. Raffle tickets available online at $50 apiece or five for $200 buy a chance for, among other things, a four-night stay with two rooms at the American Trade Hotel in Panama City, two pairs of airline tickets, and a tour of the Azuero Earth Project’s reforestation and community education projects. All can be purchased at perfectearthproject.org.

The picnic runs from 4 to 7 p.m. on Aug. 30, with a rain date of Aug. 31.