A Different Time
[The Morning Ritual prints constitute a boxed portfolio of 34 silver prints @5x6 on 11x14 sheets.]
As I look back now to when I made these pictures it feels like it was a very different time. Strangely peaceful and quiet. A time of waiting that seemed detached from the world and its cares. Jack and I had moved from Philadelphia to Columbia County, in New York State’s Hudson Valley, only two years before, seeking a healthier environment but also a last adventure. The only drugs for AIDS didn’t work very well and we had chosen not to use them. We had only the most minimal contact with mainstream medicine and the insurance monster that shadows it. Our energy was very scarce during those years and our days were taken up with the basics of eating, self care and housekeeping; free time was used for reading and a little gardening—there was no TV, only an occasional movie from the video store. We had a one thing a day rule. If we went grocery shopping we didn’t go out to eat. If we had an acupuncture appointment we didn’t visit a friend. Somehow, though, they were not unhappy times and felt less anxious than the present.
I wonder now why I even decided to make these pictures as I could see very little future, had little ambition and was content enough at the time—perhaps it was only force of habit, the persistent desire to photograph what was around me refusing to go away. Maybe what got me started was the comfort I felt watching Jack carefully going through his morning routine, or maybe it was just the sheer pleasure of capturing the light that filled the upstairs of our house most mornings that summer. What I can say for sure is that making these pictures was a pleasure and I gave little thought to how or when I’d print them. It was by pure chance that in the fall of ‘95, soon after I felt the project to be complete, I came across a person living only a few miles away who was looking for work as a darkroom assistant. With an assistant I felt I could make prints. Making the prints from the 6x7 negatives of the SLR Pentex camera I had used turned into a very elaborate process. This was a surprise. To get what I wanted I found I needed to make several unique and intricate burning and dodging tools for each negative. Each print involved numerous steps and it became necessary to create a special notation form to keep track of how each image was printed just to be able to go back and make adjustments a day or two latter.
Like all of my work these photographs come from my experience and are personal, and like much of my work were made in a private, not a public, space. Though perhaps in these pictures there is an added level of intimacy not found elsewhere in my work. There is no posing; the pictures are what would be called candid shots. Jack had no patience or desire to pose or play to the camera and I had only a little desire to direct him, something that I soon let go of. And there are no non-traditional or added elements in these photographs such as light drawing or paint as there is in much of my other work. Still, even the “straightest” photograph is manipulated if there is a person in control, since whether conscious or not there are numerous decisions behind every photograph. And these photographs were made in a conscious and deliberate manner.
It is easy forget just how different things were then for people with AIDS. In 1994 when I made these photographs the combination drug therapy that would change our lives was already being tested, but no one knew if it would work and besides, by that time so many promising medical breakthroughs had come to nothing that we had long ago stopped putting much hope in medical announcements. People with AIDS had turned to each other for support and treatment using a variety of approaches, mostly involving alternative and traditional medicine. We were no exception. It was hard to find two people doing the same thing, and it was common for patients to know more about this disease than their doctors. In spite of Tom Hanks winning an Oscar for Philadelphia that year and ACT UP fighting heroically, discrimination was rampant. Though Jack and I weren’t, most people were closeted about having the disease, and not without good reason. People lost jobs and apartments if it was known they had AIDS. Police would often wear large yellow rubber gloves when dealing with gay people, an image imprinted vividly in my memory that graphically illustrates the era for me. For my part, having worked so hard to escape the gay closet I wasn’t about to get back in another, and to be out of both closets seemed to me to be our best hope. Silence = Death was a slogan I could understand. Yet we did flee the thick of the battle and became refugees in what seemed to us at the time the wilderness of Columbia County. We had left the city, where one couldn’t go anywhere without passing the doorways or seeing the apartment windows of the sick or dying, or coming upon the places of friends already gone. Where every week brought a new announcement or funeral, where it felt to us that this disease infused all the aspects of our lives. We moved to the country without any thoughts of doctors, because we didn’t think they could help us. We wanted some peace, a quiet adventure and some time together. It was during this time together, suspended from the world, that I made these photographs.
October 15, 2010
IMAGE: Morning Ritual 1, 1994