Portraits of People living with HIV

An up-close compilation of interviews and discussions with people living with HIV in the early 1990s. 

"We have to use these forms, no matter how tired they are, in order to experiment and to develop new forms. It’s the way I feel about art and documentaries: how are we going to develop more effective means of representation ‘for us’, for the people who are affected by AIDS, unless we use the available forms? That means employing clichéd forms. What we can try to do is to alter them and make them signify for us, so that what we come up with is something radically different than what is presented to us. It’s radically different because it's ‘us’ making meaning about our situation, and not just waiting for an invitation from the culture, which someone else has always defined."

— Douglas Crimp & Gregg Bordowitz, Art and Activism in AIDS, the artists’ response, Hoyt L. Sherman Gallery, and Ohio State University, 1989