A Note on Billy Howard's Photographs

^A Note on Billy Howard's Photographs Despite a decade of experience with AIDS, we are still struggling to understand how best to treat it and how best to think about it. While we continue to argue about the most appropriate metaphors for AIDS and the politically correct terms for those with AIDS, we would do well to consider the words and images of those who are living and dying with it. Billy Howard has quietly produced a collection of documentary photographs that makes abstract argument seem beside the point. The remarkable courage and dignity of the sixty-eight persons with AIDS who are depicted in Epitaphs for the Living: Words and Images in the Time of AIDS bear testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. Howard began taking these photographs on February 2, 1987; by August 8,1988, when he wrote his short opening note for the book, fifteen of the sixty-eight people depicted in it were already dead. The first photographs were taken in Howard's home city of Atlanta, but others are from Augusta, Georgia; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Washington, D.C.; New York City; Chicago; and San Francisco. Reflecting the demographics of the epidemic in the early years, most of the photographs are of gay white men, but Howard also photographed blacks and Hispanics, women, and babies. The photographs are beautiful and haunting. Even without words, these images would hang in the mind. But Howard invited each of his subjects to inscribe a few words to be pubUshed under his or her photograph . In a few cases, when the subject had died even before receiving a copy of the photograph, friends wrote an epitaph to accompany the image. The words of the sufferers give these images added power and poignancy. Many of the persons depicted in Howard's book would otherwise have left no record of their experiences. Some among them are nearly inarticulate and can say little, even given the opportunity. But perhaps especially for them, their words take on eloquence because of the context in which they are recorded. Others are self-consciously reflective and extremely articulate in their statements. The stark contrasts among the photographs and the statements provide a graphic reminder that AIDS is no respecter of gender, age, race, or class. Literature and Medicine 10 (1991) 80-82 © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Anne Hudson Jones 81 The photographs that follow were selected to represent the variety of Howard's work. Although Howard repeats some settings, no two photographs are aUke. Each seems specially composed to convey the individuality of the person depicted. Many of these photographs show someone alone in a room with bare walls; only a few show couples together. Most show their subjects in their homes or outdoors in a place that we sense is important to them. Very few show patients in a hospital setting. The photograph that opens Howard's book also opens the selections here. It is of a man identified only as Ron, sitting alone on a bed in a room with bare walls. He has written beneath his image: "I'm afraid I may die all alone. What's more frightening is that no one will care." Billy Howard's photographs are testimony that someone does care—for Ron, for the other persons photographed here, for all those suffering and dying of AIDS. The second photograph is of Michael, who was dead before Howard wrote his introduction to the book. Michael, who looks out at us so appealingly, faces his death with a simple faith and trust in God, and with love. The next photograph, of Pat and Ron, is one of the few in Howard's book that show couples who face the illness together. The helplessness Ron expresses is known to aU who care for someone whose illness is beyond cure and whose death is inevitable. Yet those like Ron who stay and care do much more than "nothing." Andrée Walton tells us how her record reads: "'Forty six year old Caucasian female, with estranged husband, and twenty four year old son. Transfused during kidney surgery in November of 1981....' " Her choice, as she phrases it...