Project Native Informant

Hal Fischer: Et Al. Etc

September 2024

Hal Fischer made a name for himself in the 1970s by taking quite seriously the fashions of emergent gay male street culture in San Francisco. Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men,1977, his photographic portfolio and resulting publication, pushed meaning through worn denim, detailing the ways in which the sporting of hankies, earrings, amyl nitrate, and Converse sneakers could clue in like “minds” and, thusly, define gay identity. The works in “Hal Fischer: Unseen” veered away from the artist’s seminal publication to present his earlier photographic experiments, a film, a suite of travel photos, and recent works that apply his brand of semiotic readings to contemporary celebrity. 

In works that predate Gay Semiotics, Fischer inks his observations right onto the surface of gelatin silver prints. Lyon St. Eviction, 1975, is the most effective. In it, CONFRONTATION #1 – ATTEMPTED LOCKOUT AT 10 LYON STREET (PART 1) NOV. 1975 is penned under a black-and-white image of policemen invading an apartment where political writings had been scrawled on the walls. NAME THAT REVOLUTIONARY appears above cartoony, color-coded outlines corresponding to the figures in the image. Hinting at more formal future schematics, these photographs break down the image of domestic politics by way of more intimate narration in the form of the notational texts. The work feels diaristic, given the handwritten scribbles upon the surface, like note taking that pushes at the tension between photography’s stolen moment and the story it is meant to capture. 

Fischer’s eighteen-print suite Sommerpause: European Snapshots, 1980, develops the artist’s observations into a deeper poetry. Unlike Gay Semiotics, where text directly is overlaid to address aspects of the photos, in these works it is isolated and occupies a separate frame, which allows the language to unfold (almost) on its own. Here, poetic reflections takes center stage, and this emboldens the adjacent black-and-white photography in a very different way. The pictures are handsome tourist shots: the view through the window of an airplane, a length of the Berlin Wall, a Parisian street scene. The ancillary frame reads, “The Swiss boy and I acknowledge one another, foreign misfits in a sea of French faggotry. Weaving our way through the crowds on the St. Germain as we walk to my apartment, I observe a conviviality in stark contrast to gay life in the Parisian mode.” What that lyrical text and the adjacently installed Past Tense Future Tense: A Film by Hal Fischer, 1972, depict is a nearly bygone gay archetype: that of the sad young man. The film, in particular, recalls those early, experimental works by Arthur J. Bressan Jr., Curtis Harrington, and Curt McDowell, each a sad young man in his own way. 

A fascinating jump takes place from these earlier works to those that update this archetype. Three 2023 artworks apply the approach found in Gay Semiotics to contemporary celebrity culture by way of Bad Bunny, Timothée Chalamet, and Harry Styles. Commissioned by T magazine to accompany Mark Harris’s article “Is Celebrity ‘Queer Baiting’ Really Such a Crime?”, the series comprises three full-length portraits of these actors—excised from preexisting red-carpet photo-op shots with the background replaced by a flat-gray wall—with annotations by Fischer. The artist suggests roles for each: Bad Bunny as “The Innocent,” Chalamet “The Androgyne,” and Styles “The Dandy.” Fischer’s methodology shifts here, veering closer to the kind of publicity-conscious construction of public image that Richard Dyer termed “star texts.” What to make of Fischer’s focal transition from gay male culture to pop-stylist spheres? Is it as vast a shift in audience as that sentence makes it sound? For all that speculative intrigue, some critical guidance by the exhibition’s curator, Noah Ross, would have been appropriate, yet was unavailable. 

Another word for unseen is remnant. A show like “Hal Fischer: Unseen” runs the risk of feeling like the bonus disc of a classic record reissue. But there’s power in these bleach-stained images. Early photographs such as Bobby at the Beach, 1975, and other mid-’70s examples that hung salon style on the gallery’s back wall reminded us that these works pushed against the narrative properties of photography’s freeze frame with an aesthetic playfulness and a desire to say more that feels dated, but also liberatory and at odds with the anchoring project for which Fischer became renowned. They feel part of the political moment from which they emerged, which was very much in the process of understanding itself, feeling through means toward a new gay visuality and subjection. I’ll sit with these over Mr. Styles. These are the bits of “Unseen” that are worthy of our second glance. 

by Bradford Nordeen

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