Purity and Contamination: Capturing the HIV/AIDS Crisis

 

Nan Goldin, top: "Gilles and Gotscho in my hotel room," Paris 1992

bottom: "Gilles in his hospital bed," Paris 1993

     Photographer Nan Goldin captured the gay subcultures of New York City during the late 1970s and 1980s, focusing on issues of drug use and the HIV/AIDS crisis. Goldin was close friends with the people she photographed, showing snapshot images of the intimacy and relationships she had with others. The visual diary she kept unintentionally brought to light the typically unnamed identities of the victims of the HIV/AIDS crisis, showing them as friends, as individuals, as real people outside of a statistic. These specific images were captured in 1992 and 1993 in Paris, the top one of Goldin's close friends Gilles and Gotscho, and the bottom one only of Gilles, after becoming extremely ill from an HIV infection. The top image shows humanity, love, admiration, and purity. The physical human body is typically seen as 'pure', especially when displayed in conversation with other humans in a candid way. The juxtaposition of this image to the bottom image of a dimly lit hospital room, showing contamination, 'impurity', and loss shows the ways in which we view contamination as we see our humanity escape us when in conversation with contamination, and gives insight into how society reacted to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

    In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas shows the ways in which dirt and contamination play a role in disorder within the body, and how we see the human body as pure. We make efforts to contain dirt and contaminants, but to what extent can we use our body to contain this dirt until it contaminates us? Douglas brings up a point, saying "There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread of holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behavior in cleaning and avoiding dirt [...] Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment." (Douglas 2) Thinking of these ideas in the sense of disease and infection, would 'absolute dirt' be considered death, or being completely contaminated with something. Douglas makes the point that dirt is completely up for interpretation, and that contamination is how humans can classify what is pure and impure based on this standard.

    Looking at Douglas' piece, I wonder if the contamination of the body to this extent would be considered impure, but the humanity of the individuals involved is pure. The ways in which we condemn impurity and dirt as a society, especially related to the HIV/AIDS crisis, proves that many see these individuals as impure and associate their humanity with the disease they have. This makes me wonder how as a society we view other public health issues and associate individuals with these diseases or illnesses.