Aug 18, 2022 - Sale 2613

Sale 2613 - Lot 348

Price Realized: $ 3,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200

SHELBY SHARIE COHEN (1959 - )

Self Portrait of True Love Times Two, Eel River, Garberville, California.
Digital print, the image measuring 279x356 mm; 11x14 inches, with Cohen's signature, title, and edition notation 4 of 50 in ink on verso. 1987; 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 On Our Backs, Fall 1987 issue. Cohen's photographs were the centerfold of the story "Getting Away From It All." Her statement reads, in part: "I am a self portrait artist and I loved putting my film camera on my tripod and creating beauty. I put the timer on and sat down and kissed my beloved with all my heart! A group of Lesbians gathered together at Devils Elbow every summer for a month to enjoy each other's company. [...] As a queer woman I stand for photographing love as we are all created equally."

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.