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Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts
Spring/Summer 1998, Volume 25, No.1
Cocktail Hour:
Examining New Imagery in the Aids EraGuest Editor: Trena Noval
Table of Contents • In This Issue •
$8 each (no discount)
1. In This Issue
by Trena Noval4. Guest List for a Cocktail Party
by Gregg Bordowitz10. Seeing and Thinking
by Robert R. Riley14. Corporate Campaign: Clean Needles Now
by Renée Edgington17. Every Eye Sees Different
by Juanita Mohammed20. Maria's Dresses
A play by Erin Cressida Wilson22. Portfolio
Cocktail Hour: New Imagery in the AIDS Era41. The Changing Face
A prose poem by Erin Cressida Wilson44. Exhibition Review
Hosfelt Gallery: John O'Reilly, "Pastpresent"
Review by Glen Helfand46. Book Review
Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography
Review by Alicia Miller48. Books Noted
50. Books Received
52. In the Gallery
Recent Exhibition at SF Camerawork
in this issue
Driving through San Francisco, I see advertised reminders that the AIDS crisisis still with us. I see an image on a bus shelter billboard of a strikingly healthy young man smiling. It's an ad for the medication Zerit. The accompanying text reads, "Put some freedom into your HIV medication schedule."Seeing the image of this young man, I feel relieved that he seems okay, healthy. Then a bus passes me and the ad panel on the side of it states, "000,000,000,000 cured of AIDS." In some ways we have come a long way, but in others we have come nowhere at all. People are living longer some people but years of research have still not shed a light on how to eliminate this disease, how to make a cure. As scientists and activists continue to look for an answer on a global level, image makers, writers, and performers in both the commercial and fine art worlds are also exploring new ground, new ways to look at AIDS.
In this issue of Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts, we take a look at how HIV/AIDS representation has changed shifted and progressed from the focus in the eighties on the "defeated" individual, and the journey through AIDS to death, to more recent work that encompasses hope, health, and trying to get on with life in the nineties. The five writers and activists featured here Gregg Bordowitz, Renée Edgington, Juanita Mohammed, Robert Riley, and Erin Cressida Wilson are all watchers of AIDS news and makers of AIDS representation. They all come from their own deeply personal place, but each has one single reason that unites them in this observance to watch for an answer that will satisfy their loss.
Gregg Bordowitz and Juanita Mohammed pose some very tough questions about current commercial representation. Gregg looks at ads from drug and insurance companies that cater to those infected. As a healthy infected male, he looks to find himself among these images of other healthy infected people, but is at a loss with this cast of characters. Juanita examines her many years of AIDS videomaking and analyzes current AIDS representation in both her own practice and in the current methods of producing for the TV audience and its funders. What false hope about real life with HIV/AIDS is being generated onto our public viewing spaces? With all the progress made in treatments, who really has access to these promises of a longer, healthier life? And, is the public at large really being educated about the truth of being infected and what that means in terms of living now and into the future?
The media chose at the beginning of this epidemic to use the language of war and military tactics to describe to the public what AIDS was about. Robert Riley weaves together an intricate historical perspective of AIDS journalism, the language of war, and one of the last photographs published by Robert Mapplethorpe. It is a portrait of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop that appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Riley suggests that "the photographic image is a catalyst to a revolution of thinking." Perhaps with this in mind, we can begin to see, as Riley suggests, that this image of Koop was a reflection of Mapplethorpe himself, that his presence behind the camera is seen reflected in the face of Koop. Was this the purge in which image makers with AIDS started creating a view from behind the camera instead of becoming "victimized" in front of it? Riley sites Mapplethorpe as a link between the two.
Mapplethorpes relationship to early drug treatments and AIDS health led him to become a benefactor for AIDS treatment programs. In his memory, The Robert Mapplethorpe Laboratory for AIDS Research was founded, where the use of x-ray crystallography, an imaging process used to detect HIV infection in human cells, has helped to further develop new treatment and is used world wide to study the effects of HIV infection on human blood cells.
Renée Edgington has been on the forefront of AIDS activism for years, working in her community to promote awareness. Her work with needle exchange as director of Clean Needles Now in Los Angeles has helped to change legislation and has been a model for many other communities. She is also part of the collaborative art team known as POD, who address issues such as safer sex, clean needle use, and the importance of awareness through a politically savvy approach. Her manipulated images from corporate ad campaigns turn CNN's own campaign on clean needle use into competitive representation on the public market. But even with a lot of personal energy and community support, the battle is still raging every day to change the laws to promote safety in drug use and lessen the amount of HIV infection by users. This is a battle that is very tough to fight, and for those like Renée who rage forward we are grateful.
Erin Cressida Wilsons two short pieces written for the performance project Pieces of the Quilt take us on an emotional journey of those left living in the memory of the AIDS epidemic. We are drawn into these tales because they are a reminder that, regardless of medical strides and progress, we still continue to find ourselves caught up in the aftermath of AIDS everywhere. This emotional activism reminds us that, as much as there are people living and surviving, we still feel great loss for those thousands that we have lost and will never forget. Wilson hauntingly etches the faces of our lost loved ones in our minds forever.
These five writers are just a few of the many very talented people in our arts community who will not give up the wait or the fight. In the portfolio section is a selection of work by seventeen photographers and multimedia artists from the current Camerawork exhibition "Cocktail Hour: New Imagery in the AIDS Era," curated by Bob Kelley. Like the journal writers, these artists reflect the changes in AIDS representation over the last eight years of public awareness of this epidemic. The work encompasses the role of memory, humor, irony, and mortality, expanding the visual language of this epidemic in a wider cultural context. Like the writers, they also question and look for hope, and for change, in science and in cultural acceptance, responsibility, and compassion.
In this issue of Camerawork we recognize that, as a global community, we are still facing an uncertain future. We take each day one at a time, and are conscious and aware that the crisis still remains in our lives until there is a cure. Until then, we will continue to watch, continue to wait, continue to fight, continue to hope for an answer, day by day, for a cure.
Trena Noval, Guest Editor
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