After moving to San Francisco in 1988, Phyllis Christopher documented the city’s lesbian community through intimate and powerful photographs.
Christopher took much of her early inspiration from Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe as well as icons of New York street photography to craft textured, erotic and political images of San Francisco lesbians as they were.
From 1991 to 1994, Christopher was the photo editor of the legendary lesbian magazine On Our Backs. There, she sensitively captured varying moments of queer intimacy, gender expression and protest that flew in the face of overt threats of homophobia and censorship.
Christopher has called her photographs during this period “illustrations of underground experimentation.” Her bold images explicitly centre and celebrate lesbian desire, and are further contextualized by the impact of the AIDS crisis and the rapid onset of gentrification in San Francisco during the ’90s and early 2000s.
This sentiment reveals itself throughout her dense body of work, where the line is incredibly thin between parties and protests, togetherness and loss, pleasure and fear.
Christopher’s work was monumental to those in community with her, but it wouldn’t be shown widely until much later. A major retrospective of Christopher’s photography took place for the first time in 2021 at the BALTIC Centre. And in 2022, her photographs would finally be published in a book of her own, Dark Room, which highlights her work from 1988 to 2003.
Christopher’s current project, The Body in Peril, is somewhat of a return to form. In it, she uses analogue practices she developed early in her career to explore themes of aging, illness and gender transition in a highly politicized era.
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