CHRIS BOOT, former
director of Magnum Photos in London and New York, and recently the editorial
director of Phaidon Press, is producer and editor of photographer Gideon
Mendel's A Broken Landscape: AIDS and HIV in Africa, to
be published this fall:
It was in 1986 that the British government mounted the first print and
television campaign on the subject of AIDS, aimed at the whole population,
with its volcanoes and falling tombstones in shades of black and slate,
and the message that we were all at risk. It created a deluge of media
interest in the gay plague, full of prejudice and Gothic half truths.
After years of dealing with the disease in isolation, feeling ignored
and unsupported by the rest of society, gay men were now angry. In retrospect,
the government campaign probably coincided with a new confidence in
the gay community regarding what we had to do, surfacing after years
of fear and insecurity. Certainly this was a pivotal moment. A national
stage had been created for AIDS, on which a battle was waged between
the forces of light and darkness over how AIDS was to be perceived and
understood.
By 1987 there was a strong sense among many photographers and photographic
artists in London that they should act personally. In my job at The
Photo Co-op, and with the support of artist and phototherapist Jo Spence
and the art-historian-turned-AIDS-activist Simon Watney, we started
an AIDS-and-photography networking group. We aimed to support and empower
people with AIDS and ARC (AIDS-related complex, as it was then known)
through photography. We wanted to use our photographic abilities in
the wider ideological debate. The group only lasted a year or so, but
it spawned two exhibition projects which toured the U.K.
In
1989, I produced Bodies of Experience: Stories About Living with
HIV for Camerawork, the gallery and magazine. The intention
was to find new ways to describe HIV photographically and to do so from
the perspective of the people living with the disease, as an alternative
to the victim photography which the newspapers were full of at the time.
Work ranged from the photojournalism of John Cole to the fantasy portraits
of Rotimi Fani Kayode. The exhibition was dominated by the testimonies
of people with HIV, perhaps an acknowledgement that photographs could
never be enough. The AIDS and Photography group also led to an exhibition,
which opened at Londons Institute of Contemporary Art in 1990,
curated by Sunil Gupta and Tessa Boffin, called Ecstatic Antibodies:
Resisting the AIDS Mythology, and including the work of Isaac
Julien and Lynn Hewett. Unlike Bodies of Experience, there
was no attempt to correct the documenting of AIDS. More overtly political,
it specifically championed queer desire and mounted a frontal
attack on the representation of AIDS, and on related racism and homophobia.
Both exhibitions confronted the media's representation of AIDS and branded
it inadequate. As Britain's earliest initiatives of this kind, they
marked out the possibilities for photographers-as-AIDS-activists to
come. For those involved, they were necessary interventions. We had
to respond and we did.
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