Barbara Hammer’s Truant: Photographs 1970-1979

Truant: Photographs, 1970-1979 collects a decade of still photography by Barbara Hammer. She made the work in the years before becoming known as one of the founding figures of feminist and lesbian experimental cinema.

The book gathers work Hammer shot across the 1970s, while she was completing her MA in film at San Francisco State. She was also beginning the run of short films, Dyketactics among them, that would define her career. The photographs sat mostly unseen for decades before Capricious published them in 2017.

Hammer went on to make dozens of films across five decades. She became a central reference point for queer experimental cinema and, later, for art dealing with illness after her own cancer diagnosis. Truant recovers the photographic work that ran alongside and preceded that filmmaking career.