Picturing AIDS: by Michael Bronski
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Yakima Sandoval
Brooklyn, NY, Sept 28, 1992
All Photos by Thomas McGovern
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In the early years of the epidemic we were driven to explosive anger when
government officials refused to even mention the word "HIV" and the media
pandered to popular prejudice by ignoring or misrepresenting the struggle of
people with AIDS. When we did find representations of the medical, social,
and psychic dimensions of AIDS, it was no surprise that they came largely
from queer artists: poets, performance artists, novelists, playwrights,
filmmakers, and visual artists. Writers such as
David Feinberg,
Michael Lassell,
Craig Lucas,
Christopher Bram,
John Weir,
Larry Kramer,
William Hoffman,
and Michael Klein
began representing the reality of AIDS on gay men's lives and their approach
tended to be realistic. Works such as "In Memory of Angel Clare,"
"The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Sockett,"
"Longtime Companion,"
"The Normal Heart"
presented us with what seemed to be inevitable scenarios with which we were all too
familiar: the discovery of KS, the hospital visits, the anger and disbelief,
the loyalty of friends, the abandonment by biological families, and finally
the deathbed watches. These were narratives that mattered enormously to us.
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Photographers--the first visual artists engaged with the epidemic--faced a
tougher task. While literary works were able to powerfully engage us with
the unfolding complexity of their narratives, the power of the modern,
documentary photograph was in its single image. How could the complexity of
AIDS be represented in a single image? Given the demoralizing and
sensationalistic media images of People With AIDS, one of phototgraphy's
initial mandates came to be putting a "human face" on the epidemic. But
where might photographers turn for inspiration? Hiroshima or Auschwitz? Not
very easily. Much of the power of photography about the Holocaust--showing
piles of dead bodies, emaciated camp survivors, the camps
themselves--emanates from the subject matter of the work, that is, from
something visible and unmistakably recognizable, rather than something that
happened to individuals who might be our friends and neighbors. Bracketed by
a beginning and an end, the Holocaust was also a human and political
cataclysm set in time, while the havoc and pain of AIDS continues. The
ultimate meaning and scope of AIDS is not so much incalculable as waiting to
be calculated.
This discussion of how AIDS might be "represented" in
photography (and other visual art forms) has been ongoing for more than
fifteen years. In many ways Thomas McGovern's "Bearing Witness" (A.R.T.1999)
recapitulates and reminds us of those discussions. "Bearing Witness" is a
portfolio of 61 photographs that attempts to convey the impact of AIDS on
mostly individual lives. Given the endless possibilities of how an artist
might "bear witness," McGovern has judiciously limited the scope of the
project to photographs of people with AIDS and activist demonstrations in
the U.S. (The latter, no doubt the result of his being a photojournalist and
covering AIDS activism for "The Village Voice"
for years.) Nearly half of the photos are
solo shots of women and men who are living with AIDS, the other half split
between people with AIDS and their partners, families and friends, and ACT
UP demos, hospital rooms, and social gatherings. Subjects are named and
often offer brief commentary about their lives as an appended,
photo-journalistic text, rather than printed on McGovern's prints
themselves. Because McGovern began the project more than a decade ago some
of his subjects are no longer living. The simple inclusion of a date of
death makes us realize how terribly time-bound is this endeavor--a reality
made all the more poignant by the realization that as the years pass more of
the people pictured here may require such a notation.
"Bearing Witness" is
also a fascinating reminder of the connection between the emergence of
ACT UP
in the late-eighties and the agit prop art that
helped make it so widely known and effective.
The same year Gran Fury's public-art poster appeared (it was commissioned
by Patrick Moore for the Kitchen and read: "With 42,000 Dead/ Art Is Not
Enough/ Take Collective Direct Action to End the AIDS Crisis"), New York
University's Grey Gallery opened a pioneering show of AIDS portraiture by
Rosalind Solomon. In his introduction
to the show's catalogue, Thomas W. Sokolwski compares Solomon's project to
the documentary work done by Dorothea Lang
and Walker Evans for the
Farm Security Administration during the depression and notes how Solomon
"deconstructed the monolithic view of AIDS" by refusing to view people with
AIDS as victims by moving them out of the expected hospital settings. And
indeed, none of Somolon's subjects looks like a victim. This is especially
the case when she focuses on PWAs (primarily men) who exhibit KS lesions.
Despite these manifest and in 1988 very common "signifiers" of AIDS,
Solomon's subjects look directly at the camera, unflinchingly, and seemingly
unselfconscious about their "stigma." Indeed, with the exceptions of a man
lying down and some couples kissing, most of the women and men gaze directly
at the camera. Given the mainstream media's persistently negative
depictions, in the 1980s, of PWAs as guilty victims, dangerous predators,
and social outcasts Solomon's introduction of sexuality into her photographs
was a radical step.
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AIDS Demonstration
Washington, DC, Nov 1992
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The AIDS component of Nicholas Nixon's retrospective
exhibition, which opened at The Museum of Modern Art
six months after Solomon's show, took a very different tack.(This material
became the core of the "People With AIDS"
book, published by David Godine, Boston, in 1991 with text by the
photographer's wife, Bebe.) As Bebe Nixon would later write in her
introduction to it "[T]his book is about fifteen people. Very little of it
is about their everyday lives. Most of it is about their sickness, their
dying, and their deaths." Nicholas Nixon's photos are indeed heart
wrenching. Even when Nixon photographs them when they look and feel
relatively healthy, the ongoing photographic portraits continue until the
people are seriously, ill, often profoundly emaciated and dying. Like photos
taken of survivors immediately after the liberation of the death-camps these
pictures disturb deeply. But unlike the subjects of those Holocaust images,
Nixon's subjects are all headed for the grave. The opening of "People With
AIDS" was picketed by ACT UP which criticized the exhibit for only showing
people dying of AIDS, who were not, in the group's terms "vibrant and sexy."
Whatever the Nixon's intentions, "People With AIDS" feels like snapshots
from a growing necropolis--even today.
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Ironically, all this black-and-white,
highly conventionalized documentary photography was not only caught in an
ideological crossfire about positive and negative images, but in a
representational crisis that quickly rendered them nearly obsolete in the
face of works like Gran Fury's. If the purpose of the work, like so much of
the work of modern, muckraking photo-journalists and documentary
photographers, was to change minds and effect social change, how could one
compete with the media-savvy methods of the ACT UPpers and their Gran Fury
counterparts? Such new, post-modern approaches that employed photography
without necessarily being photography, made much photo-portraiture look
downright old fashioned. Billy Howard's
"Epitaphs for the Living: Words and Images in the Time of AIDS"
(Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, TX ) published in 1989, for
instance, was one of the earliest, in book format, to present a gallery of
portraits of people living with AIDS.
The intent of Howard's project was to "put a human face" on the
epidemic. But even though some of Howard's subjects gamely observe, in
their hand written statements accompanying the photos, that they are living
with--rather than dying from--AIDS, the book itself suggests otherwise: "In
these faces and voices," writes Lonnie D. Kliever, in her introduction, "We
meet men and women who have learned life's hardest lesson: the postponement
of death is no solution to the problem of death."
Likewise for Carolyn Jones's 1994
"Living Proof: Courage in the Face of AIDS"
(Abbeville Press, New York.) Relentlessly and engagingly upbeat, Jones's
vision was the sign of new times, a premonition of protease inhibitors to
come. These were women, men and children thriving with HIV: an HIV+ gay male
swim team posing in their Speedos, upbeat mothers and children, famous
writers, prison inmates who have formed support groups, an Eagle Scout who
made his public disclosure of being HIV+ part of a Scouting project. A
powerful message got trapped in a representational tradition that was
increasingly ill suited to the content and the times.
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It is in the context of these books that Thomas McGovern's "Bearing
Witness" appears. McGovern has been photographing people with AIDS since
1987 (the photos here range from that time to 1997). This gives the
collection a far more historically fluid feel than with previous books,
catalogues and exhibitions. "I have come to feel that the stories I am told
and the pictures that I make are precious objects and mementos of a rapidly
changing time and place" writes the artist. And this is reflected in the
composition and narrative of the book. If Solomon took her subjects out of
hospital beds, she still portrayed them in private, domestic settings.
McGovern's tactic of moving his subjects into more-or-less public spaces--on
the street, at a rally, on a roof, next to a dumpster, leaning on a
tractor--feels revelatory and liberating.
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AIDS Demonstration at City Hall
NYC, March 22, 1994
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By including photos of ACT UP
demonstrations and actions he has made manifest the importance of AIDS
organizing to many people with AIDS. These are also some of the best images
in the book. McGovern's artistry can be seen in his portrait of activist
James Baggett at a night-time 1994 demonstration at New York City Hall and
in a near-companion image shot at New York's 1994 gay pride march. Both
depict AIDS protests. The first image resonates with urgency, its graininess
makes it look like an enlarged tabloid photo. Its drastically tilted
composition makes us feel off-center. Multiple light sources and the subtle
presence of Baggett's partly visible ACT UP T-shirt seem metaphorical. What
is most striking here is the impassioned, almost stylized looks on the faces
of the people and their frozen-in-time poses: Like an eighteenth century
painter representing the contemporary events of the French Revolution,
McGovern has managed to capture the fervor and the intense personal
investment that AIDS activism inspirited in its believers.
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The other photo,
taken during a daytime Gay Pride march, feels nearly as dark as the former
image--background buildings and streets stand in deep shadows behind
brightly lit marchers carrying placards commemorating those who have died.
The difference in lighting is shocking and places the images of the dead on
the same emotional plane as the marchers. There is no internal movement or
action in this stasis; the work evokes the stolid and iconographic images of
a French workers' strike poster from the 1930s and gives the photo its power
and its historical weight. These are people who are engaged--physically,
emotionally, psychologically, and politically--in a public arena.
Although McGovern often shoots on the street, he emphatically regards himself as a
portraitist. "While I have photographed many aspects of the crisis since
1987, it is the portraits of people with AIDS that are central to the
project and it is around these that the other photos of events revolve" he
writes in his introduction. Yet, paging slowly through the book it is
difficult to see that distinction--or its import.
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NY's Gay Pride Parade
June 26, 1994
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In his sure hands, the
personal and the political are counterbalanced and nuanced by the poetic and
the prosaic. No artist operates in a vacuum and McGovern is no exception.
How could it be otherwise with modern portraiture at the end of the
modernist era? His photo of actor, performance artist, and writer Ron Vawter
is reminiscent of Peter Hujar's famous series of reclining figures;
the torso and head shot photo of Ron Dennis, who is shirtless and sports
nipple-rings, may remind you of Nan Goldin, only with less spontaneity and
more warmth; the two photos of Willie Sandoval--holding photos of his
daughter and granddaughter; the second, after his death, his casket with
his daughter standing next to him--are suggestive of some of both Diane
Arbus's family portraits and precisely echo several of Rosalind Solomon's
portraits.
McGovern's freshest works are the most straightforward; as in the portraits
of Leslie King-Levy, a former prison innate now living in Brooklyn or of
Michael O'Brien, a former high-school teach living in Troy N.Y. King-Levy's
defiant "don't-fuck-with-me" stare and "I have a Brooklyn Attitude" t-shirt
is softened by the warmly lit room, the hanging plant above her head, and
the small, framed snap-shots on her wall. O'Brien, in a white t-shirt and a
tatoo about his biceps, flexes his muscles as he braces himself against the
lower limb of a tree. His pose has the insinuation of the implied mortality
of religious iconography--a St. Sebastian, perhaps--but his confrontational
gaze reveals less ecstasy than hard-won knowledge. He stands in not only for
the photographer, but for the rest of us as well.
View Photographs from Thomas McGovern's "Bearing Witness"
Purchasing and Publication information for "Bearing Witness"
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