A practice traversing photography, performance, narrative, criticism and curation, Hal Fischer’s work continues to be an inspirational reference for artists today. Through an intense period of experimentation, the artist seized the cultural, political and visual style of a generation of San Francisco gay men between the legalization of homosexuality through the Consenting Adult Sex Bill in 1975 and the eruption of the AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s. Fischer’s three seminal works Gay Semiotics (1977), 18th Near Castro Street (1978) and Boy-Friends (1979), apply the language of structuralism and linguistics, marrying image and text to create works laced with humour and an intentional banality.