SHELBY SHARIE COHEN (1959 ) Polyamorous Butch Lovers

Sale 2613 - Lot 347

Price Realized: $ 3,000

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200

SHELBY SHARIE COHEN (1959 - )

Polyamorous Butch Lovers.
Digital print, the image measuring 349x235 mm; 13 3/4x9 1/4 inches, the sheet slightly larger, with Cohen's signature, title, and edition notation 7 of 50 in ink on verso. 1986; printed later.

Accompanied by Cohen's Certificate of Authenticity, also with her signature and edition notation, and her Artist Statement.

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Additional Details

Reproduced in the San Francisco Bay Area Reporter, October 9, 1986, pg. 40, for the story "Women at the Castro Street Fair." Cohen's statement reads, in part: "I photographed Sky, Shadow and their other friend (lover) many times especially for On Our Backs. On Our Backs was the first women-run erotica magazine to feature lesbian erotica for a Lesbian audience. [...] Back in the 80s we were wild with imagination and sexual pleasure was created often in front of my camera."

Shelby Sharie Cohen has been a photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area for close to 40 years. Her recently discovered photographic archive offers a rare look at San Francisco's lesbian, BDSM, erotic, and queer communities during the Feminist Sex Wars and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. The Archive is represented by Bolerium Books in San Francisco and contains over 10,500 negatives and slides and more than 700 prints. These photographs, many of which were taken for the groundbreaking sex-positive magazine On Our Backs, document San Francisco's lesbian leather community and the rise of sex clubs during the Feminist Sex Wars, as well as the city's wider queer community as reflected in Theatre Rhinoceros, AIDS fundraisers, the Gay Games, gay weddings, music festivals, and political activism. Cohen currently lives in Northern California and focuses on portrait photography.