After Silence: A History of AIDS through Its Images by Avram Finkelstein, and: Cell Count by Kyle Croft and Asher Mones (review)

We live at a moment of great interest and reinvestment in the history of AIDS activism in the United States, Canada, and Europe. These histories are undergoing a storytelling process through which certain accounts begin to take canonical form. This process of canonization may make AIDS activist histories more available to those who did not experience them firsthand, but this process also leads to the occlusion of complex and lesser-known aspects of the histories at stake. These AIDS activist histories are being solidified through new autobiographies, memoirs, and massive art retrospectives, such as the 2015–17 touring exhibition "Art AIDS America," and recently produced historical dramas, television movies, and activist documentaries, most notably the Oscar-nominated films How to Survive a Plague (2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), and 120 Battements par Minute (2017). Media and cultural studies scholars like Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr, Jih-Fei Cheng, Nishant Shahani, Alexis Shotwell, and Marty Fink among others, have been troubling this narrative distilling process alongside Finkelstein for a decade now. Finkelstein's latest contribution, however, digs deepest into the images associated with ACT UP/New York that have become internationally recognizable.

Part personal mémoire, part activist history, and part theoretical musing, Finkelstein's After Silence is a poetic intervention at this peculiar moment in the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He makes clear this work of nonfiction is his story alone, a memory-work informed by firsthand experiences, diaries, and primary documents now thirty years old. What's most fascinating in this contribution to HIV/AIDS historiography in the United States is its candor and self-awareness. The images of the Silence = Death collective and the propaganda arm of ACT UP/New York known as Gran Fury have gained mythical status as exceptionally designed and gloriously executed visual works. Museums like the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC, and the New Museum in New York City clamored to exhibit these works recently, as nostalgia for 1980s and early 1990s cultural production has reached a fever pitch. What is so useful in After Silence is the demystification as to how the images came to be, who made them, under what conditions, what motivated the image-makers' process, and inevitably how they came to circulate in the world.

Finkelstein's early reflections on the work of the Silence = Death collective, a small group of friends that came together out of fear and isolation to figure out how to survive the epidemic together, is surprisingly quotidian. These friends, all gay Jewish men living in New York in the mid-1980s, did not come together with the explicit goal of making museum quality cultural interventions about the biggest health crisis of a generation. Yet they were still responsible for the now-iconic Silence = Death graphic with the upturned pink triangle. The group's purpose was humble, the design process was decidedly collective, and the outcome was nothing short of world-changing. As a road map for future activists to learn from, which Finkelstein often indicates is in part the purpose of his text, After Silence's best quality is its humility and sincerity around how some of the most significant cultural activism of the twentieth century came to be: organic, collective, mutually sustaining, and politically precise.

The book, much like a museum exhibition, takes the reader through numerous works that Finkelstein describes in detail. He illuminates for the reader the collective processes that produced well-known graphics like Kissing Doesn't Kill, Read My Lips, Art Is Not Enough, The Government Has Blood On Its Hands, and of course, Silence = Death. What is missing from the text though, are the failed graphics. As an HIV/AIDS activist and scholar I would be curious to learn more about the images that never made it...