Apr 2, 2024
In Part 2, we hear about
Chloe's first photo show, which took place at The Bearded Lady.
Chloe describes The Bearded Lady as a hub, a place to do and get
everything you could possibly need. It and the Kiki Gallery next
door were both on 14th Street near Guerrero.
Another queer artist, Cathy,
liked Chloe's show and suggested that she go to art school.
And
so Chloe got into San Francisco
Art Institute. She had a darkroom at her home and sometimes printed
at Harvey Milk Photo Center in Duboce Park. But she was able to do
so much at her school.
At this point in the podcast,
Chloe and I talk about photo editing and what that process was like
in the analog film days. I name-drop Photoworks and Chloe mentions
the photo labs at Macy's, then we end with Chloe's acknowledgement
that people are embracing film again.
I ask Chloe about the 2000s.
Her daughter was born and they left The City, finding a new home in
the East Bay to raise her kid. With the shift from film to digital,
Chloe struggled to keep up and her life priorities
changed.
We talk about so many places
that were important to the queer, dyke, and lesbian scenes closing
in the Millennium. People from that scene started having kids and
some pursued careers in other cities. Many wanted more space and
couldn't get it in The City. The Dotcom boom happened, and folks
were bought out or got priced out.
That leads to a sidebar on the
recent resurgence we're seeing here in San Francisco. There's
Mother Bar of course, where we recorded, and Chloe mentions other
new queer art spaces like Schlomer Haus Gallery. We wonder whether
the pandemic was a correction event.
The conversation shifts to how
Chloe's photo book, Renegades, came about. Early in
the pandemic, when everyone stayed home, her daughter came back
from college to live with her. Her daughter saw Chloe's photos and
told her to start an Instagram account. She did, but of course her
daughter set it all up.
They scanned many, many photos
and started to post. The reaction was endearing and intense and
overwhelming, she says. Chloe says it was like a high school
reunion, with so many of her friends from the Nineties reemerging
in her life on social media.
That 2022 experience was still
so new to her. But at the show's opening, people reconnected with
one another and the work took on a life of its own. Chloe says
people were in tears. They took photos of their
photos that were in the show. 300+ people attended the opening that
night and many of those went to the after party at Mothership Bar
on Mission.
"We all just showed up like
nothing ever happened," Chloe says. Younger people at the opening
told her, "This is why I moved to San Francisco," speaking to the
scenes depicted in Chloe's photos.
We end Part 2 with Chloe's
interpretation of our theme this season: "We're all in it." There's
a special shout-out to photobooths.