Through the Image: Nicholas Nixon's "People with AIDS"

Abstract

In 1988, New York's Museum of Modern Art exhibited a retrospective of Nicholas Nixon's photography: a presentation of five serial projects, each organized around a central unifying theme. In an effort to capture the projects' original "precision and subtlety," the MOMA exhibition catalog painstakingly reproduced, down to their exact size, photographs from "People, 1978-1982," "Old People," "At Home," "The Brown Sisters," and "People with AIDS: Excerpt from Work in Progress." 1 These last photographs—a series of portraits of Tom Moran documenting his physical deterioration from AIDS-related illness from August 1987 until a few days before his death in February 1988—were the beginnings of a project that took its final form as a book entitled People with AIDS (1991). The book included fifteen separate series of large-format photographs, each centering on a different person with AIDS (all but one of whom had died before the project was completed), and each prefaced with an explanatory essay written by Nixon's wife, Bebe Nixon. 2