Phyllis Christopher was among the many young people who arrived in San Francisco to take part in the 1990s LGBTQI+ cultural renaissance. In 1988 she drove across the country from New York to settle in the city going through a thrilling and turbulent time. 

It was the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and LGBTQI+ people were fighting for visibility, medical attention and basic civil rights. She started taking photographs for ‘On Our Backs’, a magazine seeking to create a radically new vision of lesbian sex and erotica. She turned her lens to street protests (which she remembered sometimes happened three times a week) and queer women sharing intimate moments – that is, a lot of lesbian sex. Both were fearless acts of rebellion – and are, three decades on, still full of rage, power and pleasure. 

Phyllis had no trouble finding people to photograph – women in front of her camera were driven by the desire to be seen, documented, and remembered in the most ecstatic moments. Her work from that era is collected in the book ‘Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest 1988-2003’ which was published by Book Works in March 2022 (with newly commissioned essays by Laura Guy, Susie Bright, Michelle Tea and Shar Rednour who also witnessed the era).

Now based in Newcastle in the UK, the photographer recently had several exhibitions locally: ‘Contacts’ at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and 'Heads and Tails’ at Grand Union in Birmingham. She also runs a community darkroom at NewBridge Studios in Newcastle with Janina Sabaliauskaite. The HÄN team was incredibly lucky to meet Phyllis at one of the workshops hosted for the ‘Head and Tails’ exhibition - seriously starstruck in the presence of the person behind so many iconic lesbian and queer images which defined us and the generations after us. 

For a special feature in HÄN, we had a chat about archives, photographing people having sex and how beer-stained Polaroids end up in museums. 

 

 

@Phyllis Christoper - Castro Street Fair, San Francisco, CA, 1989

 

Anastasiia Fedorova: The idea behind HÄN started from being interested in archives and their meaning for the queer community. Have you always looked at your work as an archive of sorts, even at the time when you were making it?

Phyllis Christopher: No, absolutely not. At the time I was doing the work, I never had thought about archives. It's just really in the past five years that people have been mentioning it. I knew something important culturally was happening in San Francisco in the 1990s. We all had a sense with that critical mass of women coming together and being sexual and being political was really important. So, I had an agenda to record as much as possible. 

I never thought that I’ll put it in an archive. Now I have an archive, and as you get older – I'm going to be 60 next year – you start thinking that you want to preserve it. I also started having students come to my house to look through my material. So I know there's a need for actual tangible things to be preserved. I started doing digital work in the early 2000s and it's amazing how those photos are all on hard drives or CDs, and they're just not as accessible as photos and piles of books. 

 

From that time in the 1990s when you lived in San Francisco, do you feel like there were things that didn't get documented or preserved? 

My friends and I from that era were all interested in the media. I have friends who were making documentary films, a group of photographer friends, writers, poets, journalists. People were recording as much as possible with the technology of the day. So I'm sure a lot of it didn't get recorded, but a whole lot really did. It's a matter of people having the time and the inclination to and the funds to go back and look into what they've kept. 

In our apartment, we had two walls of Polaroids, from ceiling to floor, like hundreds of Polaroids – we would take photos of every party, every gay day, everything. That sort of snapshots I think are the most interesting. 

 

@Phyllis Christoper - Alley, South Of Market, SanFrancisco, CA, 1997 

 

It’s interesting that today Polaroids and physical photography are regarded as something very precious. It’s crazy to think that back then it was a simple quick thing. 

Yeah, we were using it like wallpaper and spilling beer on it at parties, and now people are holding it with white gloves.

 

You photographed people in a lot of different situations and a lot of different states – especially people being vulnerable and sexual. Why do you think people were interested in being documented like this?

I think because they never had before. I think the lesbian community, and the wider LGBTQ+ community at the time, was really wounded, and damaged. So they get to San Francisco and they're just like, oh, there's a whole lot of people like me, and especially really fun girls who want to have a good time and just express themselves. It was an environment of wanting to communicate and also this is the first time we've had cameras and we were not going to get arrested or prosecuted – and we're going to just do it. And we had publications and presses, so there was an outlet for it and a way to show it to other people. Everyone was sort of coming of age and wanted to celebrate. 

 

@Phyllis Christopher - San Francisco, CA, 2000

 

@Phyllis Christopher - San Francisco, CA, 2000

 

Do you feel like the way we regard and consume sexual images changed with the Internet? Was it considerably different in the pre-digital era? 

On the one hand, it seems like people are more open to photographing themselves and others almost constantly and not so afraid to do it naked. On the other hand, none of my work probably would have been shot in that era if people knew it could just get on the Internet and go around the world. It was for a certain audience and it was a conversation between our audience with each other. And I think that's changed. I think now if you put yourself out there, there's no control over it. Perhaps things are less intimate. But there are still people doing amazing things, like RUB magazine. They're doing the same kind of thing that we were doing with On Our Backs. They don’t seem to care, and they're just so brave. 

 

For making the “Dark Room” book, I guess you had to go through quite a lot of your archives. How did it feel coming back to it? 

I had a big break from that work in the 2000s and the 2010s. But I always had my top choices, which is what the book is. I still haven't had time to go through everything and find outtakes and more abstract pieces and colour work. But I already had a good 200 images that I wanted to pick for the book, and then that sort of got whittled down.

 I had been trying to find a publisher in the early 2000s and then just gave up. In 2017, Jade Sweeting and Janina Sabaliauskaite curated ‘On Our Backs: An Archive’ show at NewBridge Project, and the ball started rolling again. In fact, I'm thinking of applying for a grant to go into my archives and just have the time to see what else is in there. One of the themes I would like to explore is queer family, and comparing my extended queer family to my nuclear queer family right now.

 

Why do you think there is a growing interest in that particular era of the lesbian, dyke and queer culture? 

I think because there are queer studies departments at universities now and people understand the importance of it, so, therefore, there's a structure, there's funding for it and there are PhDs for students to look into this stuff. And that's a huge change from when everyone was just keeping their stuff in a shoebox in their apartments. 

The culture has just expanded so much over the past 30 years and I think young people want to know their history. I know I always found it interesting when I was younger – I wanted to know the history. And I think history is also repeating itself. I think people of my generation have a certain nostalgia, but we also don’t want things to get lost, we want the story of those who went out to protest, got arrested and fought for their rights to be told. 

 

 

@Phyllis Christopher - Protest Against Fundamentalist Christian Preacher, Halloween Night, San Francisco, CA, 1990

 

Have you collaborated with any artists and curators recently and what does this collaborative work look like? 

I've done workshops with LGBTQ youth, which I love. They share their struggles with family, coming out, transitioning and going through a lot of things. I found these workshops very inspiring creatively and having a family atmosphere. I also run a community darkroom at NewBridge Studios in Newcastle with Janina Sabaliauskaite, which gives people a safe environment to learn photography and access to print in the dark. 

 

@Phyllis Christoper - Portrait

 

All images courtesy of Phyllis Christopher. 

First image in gallery: Dyke March, San Francisco, CA, 1999

Second image in gallery: Dancer, Club Exstacy, SF, CA, 1991

 

17/11/2022 by