People with AIDS (Imago Mundi) - Softcover

Nixon, Nicholas

4.36

11 ratings by Goodreads

9780879238865: People with AIDS (Imago Mundi)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0879238860 ISBN 13: 9780879238865

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 1994

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This extraordinary book is about fifteen people with AIDS. It is about bravery and cowardice, style and weakness, honesty and self-deception, humor and bitterness. It is about the endless patience with the banality of this world, and about the rage that accrues as precious time slips away.
Nicholas Nixon's straightforward and uncontrived photographs combine with Bebe Nixon's faithful rendering of a myriad of conversations and letters, to make this a difficult and yet eminently important work. This book is a description of a single event, the onslaught of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, and how it affected fifteen individuals, their families, and their friends. Each person in the book volunteered to work with the Nixons, and as the nature of the photographs and text make clear, the bonds that developed were powerful and intimate. A testament to a terrible cultural and physical phenomenon, this book is also a rare look at humanity as it faces the struggle of life and death.

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From Library Journal:

Nicholas Nixon, a well-known photographer who has been favorably compared to Walker Evans and Diane Arbus, began to photograph AIDS patients in the summer of 1987. The 15 men and women who appear in this book responded to Nixon's call for volunteers and chose to reveal themselves throughout the stages of their illness. These photographs, which are accompanied by a text written by Bebe Nixon and feature the words of the subjects themselves, present dramatic visual evidence of the ravages of AIDS. These are not pretty pictures but they are serious works of art; like any powerful photographic image, they evoke a strong response. The reader is seeing not cold impersonal statistics but human beings confronting their mortality. A remark made by one of the participants, George Gannett, is especially telling: "I'm learning so much about how little experience any of us has with compassion for the suffering of another person." The Nixons have given us a compassionate and life-affirming work that serves as a visual documentary of what it means to have AIDS. Highly recommended for public libraries and for special libraries with photography collections.
-Richard Drezen, Merrill Lynch Capital Markets Lib., New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

This extraordinarily moving volume tells the stories of 15 people with AIDS (PWAs), laying bare the physical and psychicstet/rl devastation wreaked by the virus. The text consists of firsthand accounts by the PWAs and several epilogue-like letters and statements by family and friends (all but one of the PWAs have died). Nixon's photos are uncompromisingly realistic, showing the progressive physical degeneration that is the disease's trademark. Most affecting are pictures of Tom Moran, a former alcoholic, whose boyish face and body project both childlike hopefulness and mature stoicism. Nixon's photo of Bob Sappenfield, lying in bed being hugged by his parents, his mother looking sweetly and sadly at the camera, his father with his eyes peacefully closed, expresses indestructible parental love. Ultimately, what makes this book so powerful are the words of the PWAs themselves, which articulate the wrenching emotional evolution undergone in an attempt to reach a plateau of peace. Tragically enough, for most of these men and women, peace is found only at death. Bebe Nixon is an Emmy Award-winning television documentary producer, and Nicholas Nixon is the author of Portraits of People.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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