The Center for Sex & Culture hosts a very special book event with Phyllis Christopher, Susie Bright, Shar Rednour, Michelle Tea, & Laura Guy!
The first book of Phyllis Christopher’s explosive and tender photographs, fusing lesbian sex and queer protest against the backdrop of a city in flux. On moving to San Francisco in the late 1980s, Christopher began to collaborate with her subjects to make images in which documentary and performance converge. Dark Room brings together fifteen years of Christopher’s work, negotiating street, club, and studio, with camera in hand, to compose a portrait of a community simultaneously defining radical articulations of queer lesbian sexuality and defending its bodily autonomy in the face of right-wing politics, the AIDS crisis and urban gentrification.
Reproducing photographs of startling intensity and sensuality alongside new writing by Susie Bright, Laura Guy, Michelle Tea and an interview with Shar Rednour, Dark Room is a heartfelt record of Christopher’s devotion to an analogue tradition, to the pleasures of photographs and the community that made them.
Phyllis Christopher now lives in the UK and has recently been the subject of a major retrospective at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and solo show at Grand Union, Birmingham (one of Frieze’s top 10 shows of 2021).
Phyllis Christopher will be in San Francisco in August 2022 to launch the book with an event on 21 August at Folsom Community Centre, featuring Susie Bright, Shar Rednour, Laura Guy and Michelle Tea. She is available for events in SF and NY.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Phyllis Christopher is a photographer whose work documenting LGBTQ+ sexuality and protest in San Francisco has been published widely in anthologies such as Nothing But The Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image by Susie Bright and Jill Posener, Photo Sex: Fine Art Sexual Photography Comes of Age by David Steinberg, Art & Queer Culture by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer.
Recently, her photographs have been included in various exhibitions including ‘On Our Backs: An Archive’ (The NewBridge Project, 2017) and ‘Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance’ (Nottingham Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Arnolfini, Bristol, 2019). She was a 2020 finalist of Queer|Art’s, Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers. In the last year she has been the subject of a major retrospective organised between BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, and a solo show at Grand Union, Birmingham. Dark Room is her first monograph.
