A Strange Vibration brings to light work by three photojournalists documenting Bay Area women and queer lives at the margins from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Lenn Keller was a self-taught photographer who documented the Queer Liberation Movement through the eyes of a radical black lesbian, and her work now forms the core of the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, housed in Oakland. Darcy Padilla’s work follows life in the Tenderloin’s Ambassador Hotel in the 1990s, where people with AIDS and HIV took care of one another during the peak of the AIDS crisis in the United States. Elizabeth Sunflower’s archive has recently been rediscovered; with a focus on her Naked Seduction series, tracking the antics and activism of sex workers in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Works from each photographer will contextualize their relationships with the communities they documented from outside and within.

Presented in collaboration with the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, Ricki Blakesberg & Retro Photo Archive