The Gay Seventies
San Francisco: Gallery 16, 2019. 1st Edition. Large quarto, publisher's matte paper-covered boards, spine and upper board stamped in silver, patterned endpapers.
First edition compilation monograph on pioneering queer photographer Hal Fischer. Born in Kansas City, Fischer moved to the Bay Area in the early 1970s during a period of gay liberation and visibility. He fell in with experimental photographers Lew Thomas and Donna-Lee Phillips (founders of NFS Press), active in the nascent Photography and Language movement, an informal cohort of artists and photographers influenced by conceptual art and Surrealist philosophies, promoting theory-based practice and a critical approach to photography. The first publication of his complete works, this monograph comprises his seminal Gay Semiotics (1977), a study of visual coding among homosexuals in San Francisco; 18 Near Castro St. x 24 (1978), a primary document of the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era comprising photos he captured of a popular bus stop bench in the Castro over the course of twenty-four hours; Boy-Friends (1979), a series of photo-text "portraits" of men; A Salesman (1979), a billboard that references the iconic Cosmopolitan centerfold picture of Burt Reynolds; Civic Center (1979), which features the same photograph of San Francisco's City Hall and Civic Center Plaza repeated with different text; and Cheap Chic Homo (1979), a collaboration between Fischer and the subject Steven Ward. Illustrated with black-and-white plates; with an essay by Fischer. No dust jacket, as issued. Light edgewear to boards, with small dent to upper joint. Very good. Uncommon. Item #12531
$275.00