Post 5. Imagery of AIDS

The subject of AIDS is one that has stigmas all over the world. Before this week’s readings and the screening I confess my ignorance on the subject meant I believed in these stigmas, not knowing nor understanding the impact of the disease on individuals and how it affected their lives. In ‘Portraits of People with Aids’ I realised how much I was missing; ‘the story of AIDS: to show what the disease truly is, how it affects those who have it, their lovers, families and friends, and that is both the most devastating and most important social and medical issue of our time.’

Living with AIDS is a road that leads to an inevitable ending. What struck me about Nixon’s project is the way he chose to document this road. The deeply intimate and simultaneously devastating proximity between the individual with the camera shows the viewer week by week or month by month their gradual deterioration. ‘The result is overwhelming, since one sees not only the wasting away of the flesh but also the gradual dimming of the subject’s ability to compose themselves for the camera.’ The result is a deeply disturbing and perturbing view of a person who physically and mentally is slipping away from this world. I was intrigued though, by the debate sprung from the photographs. On the one hand, it can be perceived that the subject’s self consciousness disappears, Nixon believing that ‘perhaps, because stripped of so many of their hopes, less masked than others, are more open to collaboration.’ Then again, one question’s ‘is this relationship one of growing intimacy? Or is it one of the subject’s gradual tuning out, and their abandonment of a sense of self?’ Both are equally pressing on the conscious of the viewer. From the screening of ‘Danny’ we see how AIDS is a debilitating disease, day by day the body breaks down, to the point that Danny could not move from the couch to answer the phone, was covered in lesions, and needed assistance in breathing. The images of people with AIDS are often extreme cases, where the person no longer seems a human, but rather a skinny, bony, fragile and shallow cheeked living corpse. One thing that stuck in my mind from ‘Danny’ was when he asked his mother ‘why doesn’t God take me now?’ The way in which the documentary was filmed was also quite interesting in the context of the illness. We never see the protagonist himself talking, only his voice is heard answering questions, whilst before and after pictures flash on screen. Through this the audience is forced to make the connection between the voice and the face, watching Danny go from healthy and youthful, to ravaged and sick. In this way there is a forced detachment, and one may argue this is symbolic of an AIDS sufferer’s detachment from society, so often outcast and ostracised for their disease that they are almost feared. When filmed, people with AIDS ‘often appear like terrorists, drug kingpins and child molesters, in a shadowy silhouette, backlit with light from their hospital room windows’. Society’s branding of those who are inflicted with HIV is so negative that they fear they must hide.

The facelessness of AIDS and the terror of those who have it transcends visually extremely well in the screening of ‘Blue.’ In this we are visually shown anonymity; through the eyes of a blind AIDS carrier (one of the effects of the disease I later researched is retinitis which can cause blindness). What must the world look like sitting from their perspective? The impact of watching ‘Blue’ made me feel the protagonist’s loneliness and struggle with the world. It was profoundly eye opening, despite the audience only ever seeing the colour blue, and all the while deeply saddening.