Phyllis Christopher’s body of work documenting lesbian visibility, sexuality and protest, Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2002, was published by Book Works in 2022. Her work had previously been published in Nothing But The Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image (co-edited by Susie Bright and Jill Posener), Photo Sex: Fine Art Sexual Photography Comes of Age (edited by David Steinberg), Art & Queer Culture (co-edited by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer) and Aperture Magazine.
Christopher is the former photo editor On Our Backs magazine. In 2005, she released the DVD Sextrospective: A Decade with San Francisco’s Sexiest Lesbians — a collection of 280 photographs documenting the lesbian sexual revolution of the 1990’s. She has been featured on HBO’s Sexbites, Canadian television’s ‘Sex TV‘ and the documentary film, Erotica — A Journey into Female Sexuality.
In January 2017, her work was featured in the retrospective: On Our Backs: An Archive, at The NewBridge Project, Newcastle upon Tyne, and in 2019 at Nottingham Contemporary in the group show Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance. She is a 2020 finalist of Queer|Arts, Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers. In 2021 her work was the subject of a major retrospective organised between BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, and Grand Union, Birmingham.
