Positive Life NSW

Albert Winn, a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer, presented a paper on his work at ‘Drawing the Line Against AIDS’, an international conference held at the University of Adelaide, which explored the past, present and future of AIDS art, AIDS activism and AIDS prevention, and the connections between them. Kathy Triffitt caught up with him in Sydney.

In 1990, Albert Winn was diagnosed with AIDS. At the time, the only images he was aware of portrayed people with AIDS as 'dangerous', 'deviant', 'deserving' of their fate, passive and dying victims. Illness and the virus represented the sum total of their lives. He began an autobiographic series of photographs and writings called ‘My Life Until Now’, which chronicle his life as a gay, Jewish man living with AIDS and which earned him a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1993. Al’s photographs not only engage with representations of HIV, but are also inserted into daily and social life creating spaces for reflection and conversations. 

‘Urgency was an integral part of the earlier work. I wanted to show that regardless of illness there was a whole life to be considered, one of love and disappointment, religious and cultural identity, family, personal relationships and memory.’

Kathy: After diagnosis how did your photography change?

Albert: To answer that question, I’ll need to give a background on what I was doing before. I was taking portraits of my boyfriend/spouse/significant other Scott. These were intimate photographs of us together and nothing sexual. They were studio portraits. They were, in a way, a response to the Mapplethorpe phenomena. Those images were highly sexualised and admittedly quite beautiful in a classical sense. However, I was really concerned that there was no gay imagery that I could identify with. I mean, I didn’t look like any of those Mapplethorpe images and I didn’t look like any of the men I saw in pornography either. So, I started taking intimate photographs of the two of us.

How did the work change once I was diagnosed? The work became much more focused. I wanted the imagery to be filled with information about us and what our lives were like. I pulled the camera back a little bit and filled the frame with information like books and Rosh Hashanah cards and the Menorah, which decorate the bookshelf. For instance, that image of me standing against the bookshelf and Scott in the background working on his computer portrays the two of us living together and part of an everyday life. These photos borrow from the snapshot aesthetic (photos made by ordinary people recording the ceremonies of their lives, memories and the places that they lived and visited).

Kathy: The other interesting feature of your work is the way you position the audience in relation to your images. Your use of gaze and expression are significant in this context.

Albert: By turning the camera on myself I invited people to look. I was not setting up an exhibitionist–voyeuristic relationship, but one where the observer would be engaged, so I look back and confront the viewer to establish a dialogue. I’m inviting them not only to look, but also to engage with me and the issues. I know people wanted to look and I didn’t want them to be a pedestrian observer. That’s what the gaze is all about (along with my expression). Knowing that people come to imagery with their own baggage, history and thoughts, I wanted to respond with a blank look and let people project as much as they wanted.

Kathy: You mentioned Nicholas Nixon in your conference paper. His exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) in 1988 was one of the first and most controversial mainstream art exhibits, becoming a kind of standard by which to measure dehumanising, degrading representations of HIV/AIDS. Members of ACT UP, New York (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) staged a protest and demanded the visibility of people ‘living’ with HIV and AIDS  ‘who are vibrant, angry, loving, sexy, beautiful, acting up and fighting back’.
Once viewed as another victimisation of the person with AIDS, Nixon’s photographs are now being reconsidered as historically important and aesthetically significant. Firstly, were your earlier photographs a counter response to his ‘People with AIDS’ series and secondly, where do you think his work sits now?

Albert: I’d studied with Nicholas Nixon. I was there at the time he photographed the ‘People with AIDS’ series. His images are pretty powerful, but they’re also frightening. I don’t want to look that way and feel that way. It’s not the image I want to project either. I don’t want the illness to be a sum total of my life so that was another reason to fill the frame with information that represented our everyday life. Yes, there are pill bottles in the photograph, but there is also the Menorah.

Yes, my earlier work was a response to Nicholas Nixon’s series and other photographers who portrayed people with AIDS as the sum total of their illness. One of the reasons I included the text panels in my exhibitions and later on the spoken word, is because they made my stories accessible to the audience. Texts are not captions, but inform the work and serve to present the notion that the work is about a whole life, not solely defined by AIDS.

Nicholas Nixon continues to be a prominent photographer. His work brought the issue of AIDS into no less of a forum than the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Even if it generated protest, it brought the issue of AIDS to the forefront and that was important.

We also need to remember that when he was making those images there weren’t a lot of alternatives. When people were diagnosed it seemed like, in no time, they died. It would be a mistake if we turned away from that and pretended it didn’t happen. If we all pretended that it didn’t exist then we wouldn’t have responded in the way that we did, which was with urgency. I think it’s also important to re-evaluate his work and see how it fits into the historical arc of how we approach AIDS imagery and gay imagery. I think one of the components of the anger over Nick’s work was how it fit into that continuum of portraying gay people as ‘other’. When gay people (and most of his subjects were gay and AIDS was still considered a gay disease at the time) looked at those images it resonated in a profound way. I like to believe that since then, the photography world has become more sensitive to such issues, not just about gay people or people with AIDS, so it’s important to place Nick’s images in that historical context as well.

Kathy: The series ‘Band-AIDS’ and ‘Summer Joins the Past’ chronicle the changes and challenges you were experiencing as a long-term survivor. Can you talk about how this work evolved?

Albert: The ‘Band-AIDS’ series is about measurement and what is visible. As a long-term survivor of AIDS, and the advent of the cocktail which improved the look of people with AIDS, I realised I was walking around with invisible scars and was determined to make my illness seen. The band aids are a signifier of illness – a lesion, a place where some medical procedure has been performed. The photographs are also a response to the many comments made to me about my appearance, one that belied my true health status. They are a response that. ‘Looking good’, does not mean good health, and when someone tells you look good, it’s a form of measurement. That no matter what my appearance may be, the virus, the presence inside my body, is one of which I am aware every day and for which there is still no cure.

I put band aids every place I had had either a manifestation of illness or something that had been done to me because of illness (eg a blood test or a rash). I then photographed myself with the blotches against the grid of a copy stand. The grid was very much about measurement and progress. It was an important body of work to get me from ‘My Life Until Now’ to the ‘Summer Joins the Past’ series. At that time, I didn’t really consider myself a long-term survivor. I was just somebody who had responded well to the medication.

I’m also a long-term survivor of summer camps as well. But like I said in my statement on my website, how do I express long-term survivor-ness and the loss? How do you express this loss and grief you’re living with? 

Summer camp was once an important part of the cultural landscape of the Jewish adolescent experience in the US. Camps provided a sense of community and reinforced group identity, engendered their own allegiances and fostered networks of relationship. The photographs of summer camps are from a variety of locations throughout North America. Part of a larger body of work, they address issues of memory, nostalgia, loss and myth associated with landscapes. As a long-term survivor of AIDS, the empty spaces have a special resonance for me. Devoid of the vitality for which they were created, they are not only a reminder of a loss of an ideal, but also of lives lived and lost.

The series ‘Summer Joins the Past’ came to me after I had responded to medication and I was well enough to do some travelling. I went back to New York and walked down the streets that were very familiar. I walked by my old apartment building and even though I knew the man I’d lived with had died, I still looked at the buzzers and thought maybe his name’s still there (knowing, of course, it wouldn’t be).

Even though the city was filled with people, it felt very empty to me. I had to express this photographically. I would never get a permit from the city to stop traffic and chase all the people away so I could photograph New York deserted. Even as a child, I had always been curious about what summer camp looked like when we weren’t there. Walking down the streets of New York that memory came back to me. I started thinking about the world that existed before AIDS. It seemed there was a world that exploded wide open. I remembered that’s what that feeling was like when you went to camp. It was a time of experimentation. Relationships you made in summer camp were as lasting, at least in your memory, as some of those relationships that many people made before AIDS.

Kathy: Your most challenging work, given the responses you referred to in your conference paper, would appear to be ‘Blood on the Doorpost – the AIDS Mezuzah’. You describe this work as making your life and Jewishness meaningful.

Albert: When I heard AIDS referred to as a plague, I thought how ironic that I, a Jew, a descendant of those Hebrew slaves spared from all the plagues, would succumb to one. The idea of an AIDS Mezuzah emerged from the imagery of the Exodus story. In the story, God inflicts 10 plagues on the Egyptians and commands Jewish slaves to smear their doorposts with lamb’s blood to ward off the final plague. If you didn’t, the Angel of Death would kill all the firstborn. I commented in an interview with Weinstein (Jewish Bulletin, San Francisco, 1996): ‘It's almost like a trick. I'm putting blood on my doorpost so when ‘You’ [God] send the Angel of Death, it will pass over me [even though I already had the plague]’.

I needed something that would transform my experience, while staying in the context of my tradition. I wanted something that would continue to make my life and my Jewishness meaningful, and bring a sense of order to the chaos I found myself living. I have also been aware of the slow and ineffectual response of the Jewish community to the AIDS crisis. Hundreds, maybe thousands of Jews have suffered and died of AIDS, and yet in an organised, communal response, the Jewish world seemed silent.

What I was really trying to do was to challenge the Jewish world in the US because I didn’t think the Jewish community had responded very well to the AIDS crisis. I think the Jewish world was uncomfortable talking about homosexuality and at that time AIDS was still primarily a gay disease so they were uncomfortable with that. Certainly there were a lot of things that made AIDS uncomfortable to the Jewish world. You have to know a little bit about Jewish history to understand. Jews were accused of having bad blood – spreading bubonic plague and killing Christian children to use their blood to make matzos. What were the Christians thinking? So Jews are sensitive to issues that might revive those kinds of accusations.

But the effect on me of Jewish silence was a sense of invisibility, of alienation and separation. [I wondered] how could I make the Jewish world take notice of the suffering that was going on in its midst, and thought of using traditional Jewish rituals, symbols and objects to deliver the message. Watching the blood flow out of my arm into one of the vials during my weekly blood test, I decided to use my own blood to put on the doorposts of my house or any building to draw attention to the suffering within the Jewish community. ‘Blood on the Doorpost – the AIDS Mezuzah’ was installed at the Judah L Manges Museum in Berkley [California], in 1996 for World AIDS Day and it was the first time any major Jewish cultural institution acknowledged the day. It got world-wide publicity in the Jewish press. It was discussed at the Conference of American Jewish Museums that year, so I felt I did my job.

Kathy: How do you think AIDS changed the visual arts? Does art have the capacity to save lives?

Albert: AIDS changed all the arts in the beginning because so many people in the arts were impacted by AIDS. People getting sick and dying was a visible and regular occurrence, but that was a generation ago. Now it’s not so obvious so I go back and forth on these issues. When I’m feeling really positive (no pun intended), I think AIDS changed the visual arts and that art can change lives. When I’m not feeling so, I change my mind. It would be nice to believe that there is some kind of effect, but what I really think is that, unfortunately, every generation has to learn the lessons anew. We already see younger gay men engaging in risky sexual practices, and even older men who have lived through the epidemic taking chances with their lives. So why should we believe that AIDS has changed anything? People’s memories are short and, sometimes, people don’t want to remember. Maybe all we can hope for is that there will always be some artists who make socially relevant work, work that acts as a reminder. If that can happen, then maybe the second part of the question can be, ‘Yes, art can have the capacity to save lives’. However, it will always have to be art that is relevant to the times.         

Kathy: Thank you Al – do you have any closing comments?

Albert: Thanks for the opportunity to share my thoughts and my work with you and your readers. It’s been fun. And I hope it helps someone. Talking about this stuff always feels affirming to me. It gets lonely sometimes. I think of all the people I’ve known who have come and gone, people who have died. The art world has moved on. AIDS has moved from being a cause célèbre to being almost invisible. It’s nice to know that there is still a community out there that is still interested. 

About Albert Winn
Albert Winn’s work is primarily autobiographic and addresses issues of identity be it religious, ethnic, gender or sexuality and how each informs the other in a context of illness, personal relationships and memory. To see more of his work and a collection of contemporary visual art of other HIV positive artists, visit Albert J Winn or Visual AIDS