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Positive Lives: The Response to HIV Photographers’ Gallery, London

AIDS has inverted the traditional power relationship between doctors
and patients. In the absence of a ‘cure’, a more human form of medical treatment
has been born – one that involves dialogue between doctors and patients,
mutual respect and sometimes disagreement.

‘Positive Lives: The Response to HIV’ is a photo-documentary exhibition
that portrays the private lives and personal relationships of people living
with HIV. The exhibition is the culmination of a three-year collaboration
between the Terrence Higgins Trust and Network Photographers to mark the
tenth anniversary of the trust.

The more polemical part of the exhibition includes Denis Doran’s black-and-white
portraits. Pictures of different faces, male and female, black and white,
are accompanied by text: ‘Ian’ holding a finger to his closed lips is captioned
‘Silence=Death’, the byword for AIDS activism.

Doran’s series exploring attitudes to sexuality confronts the assumptions
people make about each other when they judge by appearance alone. The highly
individual people in his portraits, some into leather, some into nose rings
and some of indeterminate gender, have one thing in common – they all practise
safe sex. Next to them hangs a portrait of an ordinary suburban heterosexual
couple: they don’t use condoms, they take risks.

But focusing on people living with rather than dying from AIDS is as
full of pitfalls as opportunities. The most glaring is the danger of sentimentalising
suffering, familiar to us from the romantic imagery, both verbal and visuals
that grew up around consumption in the 19th century.

As the AIDS epidemic enters its second decade, the emphasis on the death,
isolation and stigmatisation of people with AIDS, has given way to one of
survival – however curtailed. This view is manifest most forcefully in Barry
Lewis’s series of photos featuring the colourful life of Winston, a drag
artist working at a London night club. As Winston says: ‘What’s the point
of dying if you haven’t lived.’

Positive Lives is at the Photographers’ Gallery, Great Newport Street,
London WC₂ (Tel: 071-831 1772) until 18 September. The exhibition
will then go on tour.