Hal Fischer (b.1950, Kansas City) has lived and worked in San Francisco since January 1975. He began his career as an artist but not long after his arrival began writing art reviews. He was a founding member of the nonprofit San Francisco Camerawork, now one of the oldest artist-run photography spaces in the United States. Fischer’s work can be found in such prestigious collections as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Hal Fischer, Gay Semiotics and other major works (Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow), Thought Pieces: 1970s Photographs by Lew Thomas, Donna-Lee Phillips and Hal Fischer (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco) and Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography (Barbican Center, London, and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin).

It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world. —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 (At the Center of the Gay Universe, Hal Fischer, San Francisco, 2019).

I’m a private person, I’m a public mind evokes the obsession with language and the migration of speech proposing the investigation of existing and imaginary simultaneous relationships of the private and public emergencies through an analysis of the lexicon of attraction and intimate strategies.