Currently at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, in the NE corner of the UK is a stunning retrospective of the work of Phyllis Christopher. Titled CONTACTS it is an intimate glimpse at the lesbian community in San Francisco in the ‘90s 

Phyllis Christopher is an American photojournalist living and working in Gateshead. She has photographed a wide variety of subjects but her main focus and passion — what she considers her life’s work — has been to document the lesbian community. Although she has worked as a photographer for over 25 years, she considers her lesbian erotic work as emerging because it has not been archived or published as an accessible book, and until recently this work has had no audience outside of the community that it documents

Amid the connected crises of HIV/AIDS and gentrification, Christopher and her collaborators answered the historic absence of representations of lesbian life with an abundance of images showing acts of sexual intimacy and public protest – a community defiantly taking up space and taking care of their own. An ethic of consent frames Christopher’s images as photographer and subject negotiate what it means to be shown and seen as lesbian, both then and now.

Contacts is curated by Laura Guy and is running at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead 
until March 20, 2022.

The exhibition coincides with the publication of Christopher’s first monograph Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2003 by Bookworks.