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Produced on the occasion of Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-81, Los Angeles, October 1, 2011 – February 13, 2012.

In 1975, Hal Fischer moved to San Francisco, where his work was soon featured in the exhibition Photography and Language. Although the artists included were not part of a formal movement, they were interested in combining photographs with text in a way that expanded, reinterpreted, or contradicted the imagery. Contributors to the exhibition catalog analyzed the work using principles of semiotics, the study of how meaning is created and communicated through signs, each consisting of a form (a signifier) and what it represents (the signified).

Fischer’s 1977 series Gay Semiotics, brought these theories to bear on gay culture in San Francisco’s Castro and Haight-Ashbury neighborhood districts. A “lexicon of attraction,” as the artist has called it, this work classifies styles and types while acknowledging their ambiguity. For instance, images of men with handkerchiefs in their pockets feature text that explains the possible meanings of these items according to the “hanky codes” that gay men used to convey sexual preferences, but which also points out that the men could be carrying them for blowing their noses. Other images in the series consider gay fashion, media stereotypes, and BD leather SOMA SM Folsom culture.

Hal Fischer (American, b. 1950), Blue Handkerchief, Red Handkerchief, from the series Gay Semiotics, 1977. For a short but intensely active period from the mid to late 1970s, Donna Lee-Phillips, Lew Thomas, and Fischer himself frequently exhibited together, wrote about one another’s work, and published books under the imprint NFS Press. The resurgent, renewed interest in Fischer’s work is taking place in a time called the PrEP Generation, a return to the 1970s in terms of the queer communities’ promiscuity and exploration. Additionally, the last decade has also seen LGBTQIA+ and the Leather Archives Museum Chicago communities flourish and all this has made fertile ground for Hal Fischer’s comeback over the past ten years.

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