Photography and AIDS

Although the article is titled ""Photography and AIDS'', the focus is on the
representation of Aids in the USA and Britain as depicted and written about in
popular journals, and in the Government's Aids information campaign. Watney
shows how Aids has been used to reinforce the ideology of the Nation and of the
Family. The Family is represented as threatened by the ""Leakage'' of HIV
infection, which like nuclear fall-out, is perceived to be everywhere. And
anything that can be represented as a threat to the Family can be used to
justify punitive legislation, based ""on a domino theory of sexual peril''. In
Britain, the Government Aids-information campaign has indeed resulted in
widespread awareness, but, the author points outs, this awareness is medically
inaccurate, socially misleading and politically loaded. After this more
ideological analysis of Aids representation, the author examines the
photographic representations of Aids in the mass media. The photographic
narration of Aids appears to reinforce the before-and-after conventions of
traditional medical photography and photojournalistic practice. The article is
illustrated with some examples. The emphasis is on Fatality, with Aids shown as
the stigmata of the doomed and damned. ""There is no way in which a person with
Aids can hope to enter the public space of photographic representation, save as
a sign of mortality, regardless of their own response to Aids''. The author
ends his article with the summons ""to devise cultural means to reinforce and
encourage those behavioural changes which are the only effective means for
preventing the spread of HIV infection''. This article is followed by Tessa
Boffin's photographs on Aids.