Chloe Sherman’s new book and Berlin exhibition features her raw documentary photos of femmes, butches, punks and studs in the city’s vibrant Latinx mission district
June 28, 2023
When she was in her early twenties Chloe Sherman stumbled across a photo book and realized what she was looking for. It was 1991 and photographer Del LaGrace Volcano had just published love bites, a release that is widely regarded as the first photographic monograph of lesbian sexuality from an insider’s perspective, sparking controversy and censorship in both mainstream and gay media for its sex-positive portrayal of lesbian communities in San Francisco, London and beyond.
12Renegades by Chloe Sherman
“I was flipping through the pages and I wanted to meet these people,” Sherman tells AnOther. “This book was like my temporary Bible. I hadn’t found a community that I could really relate to, so I thought: where should I go? San Francisco was the focal point, so I headed there looking for a scene as interesting as the one I saw in the pictures.” The New York-born photographer, then living in Oregon, was visiting I traveled to San Francisco with a friend and the following weekend moved to the city’s bustling Latinx Mission District.
There, in the beating heart of the city’s queer subculture, she found her people. In the decade that followedSherman lit her own world of femmes, butches, punks and hunks, I’ve taken enough pictures to fill an entire closet with 35mm negatives. Now Sherman has published renegades. San Francisco: Queer Life in the 1990s, A book and an exhibition being shown for the first time outside of the USA at f3 – freiraum für fotografie in Berlin. “I always knew it was a unique time that I wanted to capture and cherish. It was on purpose, but I never imagined how historic this era would feel so quickly.”
In my Chevy Nova, Ace Driving, 1997© Chloe Sherman
Sherman moved like “a spy in sight,” as her friends described her, slipping into view again and again, using reel after reel of film in cafes, bars, bedrooms, tattoo parlors, beaches and the streets. She caught her friends mid-laughing, mid-step, mid-dance, mid-bustle, and mid-hug with the aim of preserving that “Liveliness, joy, tenderness and resilience” she looked around. “I always had my camera with me and took lots of photos. Every night of the week there was a club, an event, a band, a place to go and we did that,” she recalls. “It was essentially my extended family, and that’s why this work became so voluminous.”
As Sherman admits, San Francisco has always welcomed the offbeat—the artists, misfits, hippies, and renegades who went west. But the ’90s were a seminal period in the city’s queer history. “It was shoddy and homemade, raw and experimental and vibrant,” she explains. “There was gender research. The community loudly and proudly embraced gender diversity in public before there was even a vocabulary for it.” By blowing up gender binaries, Sherman’s colleagues departed from the more essentialist feminism of the ’70s and ’80s, leading to “clashes” with older lesbians who rejected their acceptance of male fashion and expression. “We were a new generation and created a new starting point,” Sherman recalls.
rear view Seat, 1997© Chloe Sherman
Like Del LaGrace Volcano before her, Sherman joined the San Francisco Art Institute mid-decade and merged her appreciation for formal art with a raw documentary styleIt captures the hustle and bustle of street and night life with a careful look at composition, color and the flow of movement across the image. “I photographed the outsiders. A group of people who aren’t accepted in mainstream society and don’t appear in movies or on magazine covers,” she explains. “But to me they were beautiful and it was important to me to present this beauty in a formal way.”
Sherman never left San Francisco. But the city she fell in love with, particularly the working-class Mission District, has been gentrified almost beyond recognition since the tech boom of the early 2000s. “San Francisco has traditionally been very accessible, and as inevitable as change is, it’s sad to see what I think are the most interesting people being pushed out. Your absence leaves a void.”
renegades. San Francisco: Queer Life in the 1990s by Chloe Sherman was published by Hatje Cantz and is available now. the accompanying Exhibition is on show at f3 – space for photography in Berlin from 30 June – 3 September 2023.
