Hal Fischer
Associated with 1970s California conceptual photography, Hal Fischer’s works are marked by the artist’s insistence on the visual equivalence of word and image. The use of words as pictures—in additional to providing textual content—is one of conceptual photography’s most important contributions to art today and a hallmark of the loose Photography and Language group that included Fischer, Lutz Bacher, Lew Thomas, and others working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fischer’s Gay Semiotics (1977) was one of the first conceptual works to bring the language of structuralism and linguistics into photographic practice. It presents the codes of sexual orientation and identification Fischer saw in San Francisco’s Castro and Haight Ashbury districts as a tongue-in-cheek anthropological essay. Twenty-four photographs—with text printed into the photographs—are codified as “Archetypal Media Images,” “Signifiers, “Street Fashion,” and “Fetish.” Fischer’s work goes in the opposite direction of Robert Mapplethorpe; as one Artforum reviewer wrote in 1977, “This is to say Fischer never sensationalizes, and the voyeurism which seems to come so naturally to photography is absent.”
He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Reading Museum of Art, New Image Gallery at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, and Fotomuseum Wintherur in Zurich. His work has …
Associated with 1970s California conceptual photography, Hal Fischer’s works are marked by the artist’s insistence on the visual equivalence of word and image. The use of words as pictures—in additional to providing textual content—is one of conceptual photography’s most important contributions to art today and a hallmark of the loose Photography and Language group that included Fischer, Lutz Bacher, Lew Thomas, and others working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fischer’s Gay Semiotics (1977) was one of the first conceptual works to bring the language of structuralism and linguistics into photographic practice. It presents the codes of sexual orientation and identification Fischer saw in San Francisco’s Castro and Haight Ashbury districts as a tongue-in-cheek anthropological essay. Twenty-four photographs—with text printed into the photographs—are codified as “Archetypal Media Images,” “Signifiers, “Street Fashion,” and “Fetish.” Fischer’s work goes in the opposite direction of Robert Mapplethorpe; as one Artforum reviewer wrote in 1977, “This is to say Fischer never sensationalizes, and the voyeurism which seems to come so naturally to photography is absent.”
He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Reading Museum of Art, New Image Gallery at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, and Fotomuseum Wintherur in Zurich. His work has been included in group exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, among others. In 2015 Fischer had solo exhibitions of his newly released Gay Semiotics portfolio (1977/2015) in New York, Zurich, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Courtesy of Cherry and Martin
