Similarities Between Sekula and Crimp

I found two important similarities between the Allan Sekula’s essay “The Body and the Archive” and Douglas Crimp’s “Portraits of People With AIDS.” First, both authors discuss photographic efforts at different periods of time to remove the individuality from a particular group of people, to create one generalization from the photos/features of a few individuals. Crimp argues that the various photographs of PWAs that he discusses don’t make their subjects special and important, but rather cause them to “[abandon] their sense of self,” and by picturing all of the PWAs as pathetic, ill, suffering, and pitiable, that is all the public imagines of AIDS. The strength and remaining vitality of PWAs is completely ignored in favor of depicting them as helplessly already-dead. They only elicit pity, not solidarity, which is where Danny is different. Instead of simply rehashing the stereotypical portraits of PWAs, it also shows the subject as having been alive once, as having been attractive and an object of lust. This makes it different from the other generalizing PWA pictures. In the same way, Sekula traces the history of criminal photographs and how different people (mainly Bertillon and Galton) tried to “create the criminal body/face.” By using facial and head characteristics, Bertillon developed a system of classifying criminals and determining if someone would likely become/be a degenerate based on physical features. In both essays, photography uses individuals to erase the individual, which Crimp is clearly opposed to (“we muse continue to demand and create out own counter-images…”). And both essays are also centered on groups of people that are considered by many to be sick (mentally or physically), depraved, or otherwise unfit for society.

The other prominent similarity was the focus on society’s desire to prevent the marginalized groups (PWAs or criminals) from reproducing. As mentioned before, this is where Crimp sees Danny as quite different from other photos/films about PWAs. Instead of stealing the PWA’s sexuality, it emphasizes it (the filmmaker discusses being attracted to Danny, even with his lesions, Danny is shown shirtless, naked, etc.). Whereas the earlier discussion of Fabian Bridges showed how concerned the filmmakers were about his promiscuous lifestyle and decided to report him, here Danny’s virility even while suffering from a debilitating disease is celebrated and memorialized. The photographs of Danny do not steal his exuberance and make him simply “another PWA” like Crimp feels the other photos do- they mark him as an individual, a loved person, someone who remained himself despite having AIDS, and they are not “phobic images, images of the terror at imagining the person with AIDS as still sexual.” This fear of the reproductively viable deviant is echoed in Sekula’s piece. Galton was the founder of eugenics, and as such much of his work of identifying the “low, unfit members of humanity,” including “criminals, semi-criminals, and loafers” so that they could be marked as undesirable for reproducing. He called them the “eugenically unfit” and supported “restricting their opportunities for producing low-class offspring.” It’s interesting that similar thought processes, or at least ideas, would emerge from photography in two different time periods in response to two different social concerns. Without realizing it, the PWA photographers re-created versions of the de-humanizing composite portraits of criminals, meant to mark their subjects as unworthy of sexual desire.