Gay semiotics hal fischer

Hal Fischer speaks about his seminal s-era examination of the “hanky code” used to signal sexual preferences of gay men. That was incredibly critical. Bryan-Wilson: What strikes me now about Gay Semiotics is how conceptual it is, how important the photo-text relationship is.

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.

Of course, that made for five pictures, and then I had to figure something hal from there. 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.

How did you come gay x structuralism? Fischer: When I applied to State, I applied with traditional photography, fischer prints mainly of the landscape. They were really interested, and it was passionate.

It was like, Oh my God, these handkerchiefs … this is exactly what they are writing about. Those were two key texts. Fischer’s series Gay Semiotics, brought these theories to bear on gay culture in San Francisco’s Castro and Haight-Ashbury districts.

I figured that I could probably work with him as long as I was here. People talked about photography. The signifiers were the first pictures to come out of this thinking. A “lexicon of attraction,” as the artist has called it, this work classifies styles and types while acknowledging their ambiguity.

After I moved to the Bay Area, two pivotal things happened. Taken directly from Fischer’s personal experiences living in the vibrant gay communities of San Francisco’s Castro and Haight. I was also interested in the Bechers and the notion of repetition.

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. Who else were you influenced by? What brought you to the Bay Area, and what impact did that move have on your work?

It is thus a photo-project about the semiotics gay photography and its long legacy of ethnographic typing. Fischer: Yes. Bryan-Wilson: Who were your models? Bryan-Wilson: What was the Bay Area like in terms of a photography scene in the mid to late s?

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. Fischer: There was a huge discourse here. I learned about signifiers, and thought, This is going on all around me.

One was that I began writing for Artweek three months after I arrived, so I immediately got into the fray, so to speak.