Hal fischer gay semiotics

I learned about signifiers, and thought, This is going on all around me. 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. It is thus a photo-project about the history of photography and its long legacy of ethnographic typing.

What brought you to the Bay Area, and what impact did that move have on your work? They seem to be mostly of a certain class. How did you come to structuralism? One was that I began writing for Artweek three months after I arrived, so I immediately got into the fray, so to speak.

Bryan-Wilson: What was the Bay Area like in terms of a photography scene in the mid to late s? They were really interested, and it was passionate. People talked about photography. 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.

I was also interested in the Bechers and the notion of repetition. I figured that I could probably work with him as long as I was here. Fischer’s series Gay Semiotics, brought these theories to bear on gay culture in San Francisco’s Castro and Haight-Ashbury districts.

They all are about the same age.

The signifiers were the first pictures to come out of this thinking. Of course, that made for five pictures, and then I had to figure something out from there. That was incredibly critical. Fischer: There was a huge discourse here.

Hal Fischer Gay Semiotics : The

Fischer: Yes. Bryan-Wilson: Who were your models? 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. Hal Fischer speaks about his seminal s-era examination of the “hanky code” used to signal sexual preferences of gay men.

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

Those were two key texts. Fischer: When I applied to State, I applied with traditional photography, gelatin-silver prints mainly of the landscape. Who else were you influenced by? A “lexicon of attraction,” as the artist has called it, this work classifies styles and types while acknowledging their ambiguity.

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