THE ROBERT GIARD GRANT FOR EMERGING
LGBTQ+ PHOTOGRAPHERS
PHYLLIS CHRISTOPHER, 2019 FINALIST
Phyllis Christopher is an American photojournalist living and working in Newcastle, England. 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has worked as a photographer for over 25 years, she considers her lesbian erotic work as emerging because it has not been archived or published as an accessible book, and until recently this work has had no audience outside of the community that it documents. The dissemination of lesbian erotic imagery is a monumental challenge. Yet, over the past few years this material has become a focus of interest for academics and the art world. She has recently found a publisher who understand the political nature of this work, and her book Heart, Hand, Art: Erotic Moments from a Sexual Revolution, documenting lesbian art, activism and pleasure in 1990’s San Francisco will be published by Book Works in March of 2021.