Gay semiotics

Of course, that made for five pictures, and then I had to figure something out from there. I was also interested in the Bechers and the notion of repetition. What brought you to the Bay Area, and what impact did that move have on your work?

That was incredibly critical. How did you come to structuralism? Taken directly from Fischer’s personal experiences living in the vibrant gay communities of San Francisco’s Castro and Haight. Fischer: There was a huge discourse here. Fischer: When I applied to State, I applied with traditional photography, gelatin-silver prints mainly of the landscape.

They all are about the same age. Then I got out here, and the first thing I started doing was crazy alternative work, predominantly byinch bleached prints with inked-on text and diagrammatic drawings. It was like, Oh my God, these handkerchiefs … this is exactly what they are writing about.

It is thus a photo-project about the history of photography and its long legacy of ethnographic typing. People talked about photography. Bryan-Wilson: What strikes me now about Gay Semiotics is how conceptual it is, how important the photo-text relationship is.

I learned about signifiers, and thought, This is going on all around me. Fischer: Yes. Bryan-Wilson: Who were your models? But I met Lew through my writing, because I reviewed a show of his, and he was at the semiotics gay a movement focused on connecting photography and language.

Gay Semiotics Revisited Aperture

They were really interested, and it was passionate. Fischer: Thanks to Lew Thomas, in graduate school I began reading things like Jack Burnham’s The Structure of Art and Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art. Fischer’s series Gay Semiotics, brought these theories to bear on gay culture in San Francisco’s Castro and Haight-Ashbury districts.

Who else were you influenced by? Bryan-Wilson: Gay Semiotics is an attempt to map some of the discourse of structuralism onto the visual codes of male queer life in the Castro. I still do. How did you come to structuralism?

Gay Semiotics Since —when the first exhibition of this series took place in San Francisco— Gay Semiotics has been recognized as a unique and pioneering analysis of a gay historical vernacular and as an irreverent appropriation of structuralist theory.

I figured that I could probably work with him as long as I was here. Bryan-Wilson: Gay Semiotics is an attempt to map some of the discourse of structuralism onto the visual codes of male queer life in the Castro.

Hal Fischer Gay Semiotics

A “lexicon of attraction,” as the artist has called it, this work classifies styles and types while acknowledging their ambiguity. Those were two key texts. The signifiers were the first pictures to come out of this thinking. Bryan-Wilson: What was the Bay Area like in terms of a photography scene in the mid to late s?

One was that I began writing for Artweek three months after I arrived, so I immediately got into the fray, so to speak. After I moved to the Bay Area, two pivotal things happened.