Thought Pieces: 1970s Photographs by Lew Thomas, Donna-Lee Phillips, and Hal Fischer

Thought Pieces reunites three San Francisco photographers who spent the late 1970s stripping photography of its inherited mysticism, rebuilding it instead on grids, texts, and semiotic diagrams. The result recovers one of the sharpest, least sentimental corners of American conceptual art.

MACK published the book in 2020, alongside a survey exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Its 216 pages divide into four sections: one for each artist's own work, and a fourth reproducing pages from the NFS Press books and pamphlets the group produced between 1976 and 1981. Editor Erin O'Toole, SFMOMA's curator of photography, assembled material that was largely unmarketed and text-driven, and had fallen outside most photography histories.

Lew Thomas led the loosely allied group he called Photography and Language, publishing artists' books built on structuralist ideas rather than the Bay Area's expressive print tradition. Donna-Lee Phillips, his NFS Press co-founder, brought feminist and linguistic theory into the work and designed many of its publications. Hal Fischer's 1977 series Gay Semiotics catalogued the dress and gesture codes of gay men in the Castro in the same diagrammatic format; it remains his best-known work. Their brief, intensive collaboration marked one of the few sustained American engagements between conceptual art and photography.