Gay semiotics hal fischer

A “lexicon of attraction,” as the artist has called it, this work classifies styles and types while acknowledging their ambiguity. The signifiers were the first pictures to come out of this thinking. Fischer’s series Gay Semiotics, brought these theories to bear on gay culture in San Francisco’s Castro and Haight-Ashbury districts.

Fischer: When I applied to State, I applied with traditional photography, gelatin-silver prints mainly of the landscape. 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.

How did you come to structuralism? Hal Fischer's Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men () is one of the most important publications associated with California conceptual photography in the s. People talked about photography. They seem to be mostly of a certain class.

After I moved to the Bay Area, two pivotal things happened. Bryan-Wilson: What was the Bay Area like in terms of a photography scene in the mid to late s? But I met Lew through my writing, because I reviewed a show of his, and he was at the center of a movement focused on connecting photography and language.

It is thus a photo-project about the history of photography and its long legacy of ethnographic typing. Fischer: There was a huge discourse here. They were really interested, and it was passionate. Who else were you influenced by? When Hal Fischer published his wry, straightforward Gay Semiotics photographs in , he wrote an essay to accompany them.

I learned about signifiers, and thought, This is going on all around me. I was also interested in the Bechers and the notion of repetition. One was that I began writing for Artweek three months after I arrived, so I immediately got into the fray, so to speak. That was incredibly critical.

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. It was like, Oh my God, these handkerchiefs … this is exactly what they are writing about.

Removed from the faux romanticism and obsessive formalism that dominated gay “art” photography, Gay Semiotics became the first work to establish a common point between the dominant or mainstream art trends of the 70s and a burgeoning gay subculture.

First published as an artist’s book in by NFS Press, at a time when gay people had been forced to both evaluate and defend their lifestyles, Gay Semiotics: a photographic study of visual coding among homosexual men earned substantial critical and public recognition.

Handkerchiefs signify behavioral tendencies through both color and placement. Of course, that made for five pictures, and then I had to figure something out from there. What brought you to the Bay Area, and what impact did that move have on your work? I still do.

Bryan-Wilson: What strikes me now about Gay Semiotics is how conceptual it is, how important the photo-text relationship is. 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.

Fischer: Yes. Bryan-Wilson: Who were your models? Fischer: This was my world, and there was no pretense about being encyclopedic. Between and , American artist Hal Fischer created Gay Semiotics, a landmark series of photo-text works providing a pioneering analysis of gay historical vernacular as it unfolded on the streets of San Francisco’s Castro and Haight-Asbury districts.

Those were two key texts. I figured that I could probably work with him as long as I was here. “Traditionally western societies have utilized signifiers for non-accessibility,” he explained, citing wedding and engagement rings.