After reading "Portraits of People with AIDS", I discovered an interesting parallel between Crimp's discussion of the PWA as photographic subject and traditional theoretical notions of the photograph itself. Like the photograph, the body of the PWA serves as a ruin and monument to his or her body at full health (I acknowledge the problematic nature of this statement). Due to disease (like the photograph's chemical-physical dissolution through time), the body with AIDS undergoes a chemical-physical dissolution as well. I found this parallel to be at once highly evident and highly problematic. Mirroring Crimp's discussion of stereotypic media portrayals of AIDS and the use of the before and after shot, this before-AIDS body (original reality) and after-AIDS body binary (captured reality in photograph, ruin) reinforces the media victimization of the PWA and makes the PWA theoretically inextricable and representationally inseparable from the photographic medium.
The ACT UP protest, instead of providing a counterimage, an image of the vivacious PWA living and defying ruin, advocated a completely disparate medium: sound/speech. "Stop looking at us: start listening to us." By depriving the AIDS "victim" of the image and of the necessity of being-photographed, the ACT UP protestors managed to go one step beyond Crimp's call for "counterimages of self-empowerment": they subverted the theoretical inextricability of AIDS/PWA to image and dissolved the very power relation inherent in the viewer-PWA binarism in mass media binary. The PWA and those that love PWAs must be heard, not seen. I think this point ties in beautifully to the idea of language as virus at the end of Crimp's speech and provides interesting new political solutions/uses/counterattacks for AIDS in media.
Likewise, what I believe both Blue and Danny (to some extent) achieve in this regard is a detachment of the PWA from the image and from the viewer's fetishistic voyeurism; Blue, in literally depriving the viewer of traditional filmic images, hiearchizing sound over image, and subjecting the viewer/listener to intricate and graphic (auditory/spoken) descriptions of the bodily processes of AIDS and the many medications' effects; Danny, in the explicit resexualization and reeroticization of the PWA as photographic subject to reverse the phobic nature of mass media/art representations of PWAs. Additionally, the use of film stills instead of changing frames in Danny generates another hiearchization of sound over image.
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