To honor that history, FOCUS exhibitor Schlomer Haus Gallery devoted its booth to works by Chloe Sherman, a photographer who documented San Francisco’s vibrant queer community in the 1990s while she was attending SFAI. “These are her friends and lovers,” says gallery owner Steffan Schlarb, describing the young women looking out behind the wheels of classic cars, or posing nonchalantly in their bedrooms. Shot on 35 millimeter FUJI film, the images remained unprinted negatives until 2022, when the gallery published them as both a book and traveling exhibition called Renegades. San Francisco: The 1990s.
Over these last decades, the quality of the film hasn’t degraded at all, “So you get these amazing deep blacks and these beautiful, vibrant reds,” Schlarb says. “It really captures a time and place, and a kind of community that isn’t really in San Francisco right now.
