Hal Fischer

Hal Fischer is a San Francisco-based artist who works in photography, text and performance. One of the prominent figures of American conceptual photography of the 1970s, his work is documentation and celebration of "the gay universe", which was San Francisco's Castro and Haight-Ashbury districts for Fischer. His series, such as Gay Semiotics and 18th Near Castro Street x 24, are projects consisting of photo texts documenting cruising gay men in the city's streets. The writing over the black and white photographs of men in Gay Semiotics reveals a "hanky code", signs that indicate one's sexual preference and that are visible to all but can only be seen by the members of the gay community. Fischer's photography is quiet in its everydayness; it is unapologetic in its honesty, overflowing with 1970s Pride. Born in 1950, US, Hal Fischer's four-decade-long career spans across photography, art criticism and museum management. His work is part of collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. His usage of photo-text medium is one of the pioneering projects merging conceptual photography with linguistic structuralist movement.