Representation and the Other

Portraits of People with AIDS wrestles with the issues regarding the individual in terms of a separating the representational from the subject’s truth. Determining what should be portrayed in a photograph of AIDS is a controversial issue addressed by the conflicting groups of media and their interpretation of the subject’s role in front of the lens. Beginning with the comparison between AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power and the exhibition of Nicholas Nixon’s photographs, the article highlights the issue of projection of language upon the photograph’s subject, imposing either author’s political aims. The fetishistic effect of generalizing people with AIDS and editing their portraits to present a image of the abstract notion of the disease is perverse. Particularly where the author describes “And in the most technologically dehumanizing instance, the portrait of the PWS is disguised with added pixilation,” I was reminded of the editing of the images in Images of Spite of All that gave a disturbing icon-like quality to a photograph that should not have been tampered with. Although the original inspiration for the movement to try and find a representative notion of AIDS that would help society better confront the issues its citizens are facing or ‘combating bureaucratic abstraction’ is a legitimate cause, the Sixty Minutes show seems counterintuitive to this notion by furthering characterizing the ‘faces’ of AIDS as distinctively the ‘other’ by trying to make them more applicable to the what the shows refers to as ‘you and me.’ This audience-subject relationship as well as ‘ordinary’ versus ‘different’ characterization taking place in the pieces discussed in the article is very problematic for me. The symbolic nature tied to the person in the Sixty Minutes portrait series diminishes the true subject of the photograph through what is being read in them. The brutal nature in which the subjects are characterized as innocent or guilty in the Sixty Minutes exhibition is absolutely abhorrent. There is a definite shock value to the difference between the ostensible reasoning of the show’s choice to pair a picture of a twin with his straight brother who gives him the bone marrow transplant and the obvious interpretation of the use of the pairing described in the article. I also think the author makes an effective point when he says “the portrayal of these people’s personal circumstances never includes an articulation of the public dimension of the crisis, the social conditions that made AIDS a crisis and continue to perpetuate it as a crisis.” However, this points to the photograph’s limitations. Is it really possible to capture the extent of the AIDS crisis within the realm of the frame? I believe this is ‘asking too much’ of the photograph. I also believe there is an anthropological issue in the film of Fabian Bridges, in both respecting the subject studied and those affected by AIDS in the social effects induced by the film’s representativeness.