Jessica Tanzer is a San Francisco based photographer. Her work continues to be published and exhibited worldwide.

At the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, Tanzer’s work as a gay visual artist was directly political. Art is activism. It is Artivism.

While involved in ACT UP and Queer Nation as an AIDS activist she created photographs both powerful and graceful to promote safe sex and in response to homophobia. Several of her images were appropriated by the anonymous queer cultural activist collective Boy With Arms Akimbo/Girl With Arms Akimbo for street-postering campaigns during Republican Senator Jesse Helms’ campaign to censor art and specifically gay art. 

In the 1990s, Tanzer also chose to exhibit her work in places far removed from the embrace of queer culture. For example, exhibiting in Akron, Ohio, timed to open as the Fourth of July Main Street Parade was underway. At the same time, she says, her social message has always gone hand in hand with aesthetic concerns: “My intention has never been one of shock value, but rather to show viewers the beauty in what they might otherwise imagine is 'threatening' subject matter.” She invited the viewer in, to comfortably see the unknown they feared. Gay visibility at work in the rustbelt.

Jessica Tanzer grew up in a lesbian household in Portland, OR before moving to San Francisco with her girlfriend to study painting and photography at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Jessica struggled to come out as bisexual at age 28.  Her work grapples with that struggle as she did.  In her early days of being published she used several pseudonyms usually with some form of her partner Michele Fisher's name for her work in the lesbian erotic magazine On Our Backs.

Tanzer lives in San Francisco with her British husband, photographer Alexx Conroy.  She is currently preparing her thousands of negatives, prints and papers to induct in to the Cornell University Human Sexuality Collection where they will live permanently.

Find your voice in whatever medium suits you as the fight is not over, it is cyclical. Rise up, say gay, vote, resist and learn your history.

Silence Equals Death. Action Equals Life. Love Is Love.