Artist, Hal Fischer: My name is Hal Fischer. I came to San Francisco to go to graduate school In 1975 and things were really way out there in a very fun way.
I'm interested in a subset of all of this, which is sadism and masochism. It's not part of my personal autobiography, but I was entranced by the formalism of it. The S&M types are the most volatile images. So the challenge was how are you going to present this and how are you going to write about it?
So here we have pictures of bondage devices and people that getting tied up to a cross or a meat hoist which pulls them up into the air. but I don't want to make this too real, so I don't have people in those pictures. I posed a person in the picture, took the picture, and then I made a dotted outline in their figure, and that's what I printed in it.
And those are the ones that my writing was done to really disarm the viewer, that it was really important for me to do that and to come and to have fun with it.
This work is over four decades old, and I really enjoy that people are still engaging with it. They're still laughing when they look at it, and that's great to me.