Matt Wolf | The Face of AIDS / 2016

the meaning and use of an image

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Wolf (director) The Face of AIDS / 2016 [11 minutes]

 

This short documentary concerns the controversial use by the Benetton company of the famous photograph by Therese Frare of AIDS activist David Kirby on his deathbed surrounded by his family. Commissioned by Time as part of its series of 100 Photos, featuring what the magazine described as the most influential photographs of all time.

    As one observer noted, there are so many individuals shoving their way into the scene to explain the use of the dying man’s photograph that it is truly impossible to get a perspective on the situation. Everyone is justifying something, while the being behind this terribly haunting image has utterly no voice.

     Former Benetton Creative Director Oliviero Toscani attempts to explain his and the Benetton Company’s intentions in using the photograph in their product advertisement of 1992. Toscani argues that it is a loving picture, and is not a tragic picture at all even if the situation itself is tragic. For him the picture put the situation in front of the viewer’s consciousness, “What am I doing for that problem.”

     AIDS activist Marlene McCarthy, on the other hand, insists that it seemed so evident on what Toscano and Benetton were doing: “On one hand you had this very intimate situation and you had a logo that was about selling. Benetton was a clothing company. It just seemed so evident what he was doing. He was creating sensational iconographical images that people would remember along with the brand Benetton.”

     Kirby’s parents on the other hand insisted they were not looking at the commercial side of it. To them it was an opportunity to make people think about AIDS. And the photographer relates that the family claimed “Benetton’s not using us; we’re using Benetton.” They wanted people to know that he lived and that this was what the devastating disease does to people.

     As a graduate student at the University of Ohio Frare determined to center her photographic project on AIDS. In a nearby small town a young man, David Kirby, had been diagnosed with AIDS creating terror in this small burg. They even burned the ambulance which carried Kirby to the Pater Noster House in Columbus, Ohio which served as a hospice for dying AIDS patients.

    Although this short film doesn’t mention it, Kirby was a gay activist in the 1980s, living in California estranged from his family when he contracted HIV. Contacting his parents, he asked if he might come home to die, his family welcoming him home.

     The head of the Pater Noster hospice believed that it was important to see what AIDS did to people, and allowed Frare into the center with a camera. She had already been taking pictures of a combination caregiver and client at the House, Peta (born Patrick Church), who crossed genders and according to Frare was a rather remarkable person. One day nurses came to get Peta so that he might be with David, and Peta brought along Frare. The photograph stood outside David’s door not wanting to intrude until his mother came out and “told me that the family wanted me to photograph people saying their final goodbyes. I went in and stood quietly in the corner, barely moving, watching and photographing the scene. Afterwards I knew, I absolutely knew, that something truly incredible had unfolded in that room, right in front of me.”

      Earlier, she recalls, she had asked David if he minded her taking pictures, and he, wanting to get the word out about how devastating AIDS was to families and communities agreed to the photos as long as they were not sold for “personal gain.” Frare claims that she never has received any money for the photograph and, at the time, imagined, in any event, that no one would ever see the pictures. In fact, it is estimated that when the pictures appeared in Life magazine as many as one billion people saw the photo. 

    McCarthy recalls the terrible days of the period in which the government would not even say the word AIDS and communities of people started speaking for themselves.. She repeats what so many involved in the gay community repeat. “Suddenly it was like going to a funeral every weekend.” Tom Kalin repeats that the members of ACT UP initially said, “We’re not victims. We’re people with AIDS. And there are political reasons why this disease existed.”

      Toscani insists that when he went to work for Benetton he attempted to get them to see their adds as not just a communication to sell the product but to “do something more.” Indeed Benetton ads invoked a great many problems and issues of the day, including racial equality and the environment. One of the most memorable of their ads was clearly anti-war.

 

     But clearly he also recognized its parallels with religious iconography. The dying boy looked like many Christians’ image of Christ and the positioning of the family obviously calls up the various sacred pietàs.*

      But Toscani also explains that he wanted to shift the image from black-and-white to color in order to make it, as he put it, “more realistic (actually, it seems less realistic and softer as an image from the harsh realism of the black-and-white to me), the point being that Toscano wanted to employ the sensationalism of the situation in relation to his company’s logo.

      When they contacted Frare about using the image, she was ambivalent, but the Kirbys “said let’s do it.”

        If it was provocative argues Toscano, but so is most of great art. The intention was a positive provocation without any of the negative intent he claims.

        Yet the gay community who wanted to now boycott Benetton’s products, as McCarthy reminds us, did not see any message of empowerment; there was nothing coming from that image the way it was used, she argues, to give people a way “to take action in their own world.”

        But Toscani argues that he doesn’t see where AIDS activist were more effective than he was. He had a big company willing to invest money to make people aware of AIDS throughout the world.

        And on some talk shows people begin commenting, in fact, that we should not blame Benetton but the United States government for not taking action. But Kalin argues it did not increase dialogue but became a kind of road block that shut things done, people unable to assimilate the fact that a large company was using this tragedy as a kind of commodity.

        Even Toscano agreed that such controversy also makes economic success. Benetton profits rose after the incident.

        One has to admit that there is something basically crass about using the image of a dying man who had literally starved to death in order to sell clothes. And the linking of social issues of male and female costumes probably did not truly bring about social change.

        Yet one must conclude, at least in this case, that this image and its controversy did in fact raise consciousness about AIDS, whatever that might have meant. And the fact that this film is still discussing those issues 24 years after David Kirby died in that bed, and I am commenting on it even today, 32 years later—at a time when we still have no cure for AIDS and, even worse, a large portion of our population does not even believe in protection from diseases like polio, tuberculosis, and measles that science and documented data have proven effective—is significant. Openly talking about and even representing the effects of a disease are certainly far better than the Reagan administration’s refusal even to acknowledge AIDS existence or perhaps their homophobic insistence that it was attacking only the undesirable queers whom they didn’t feel they needed to worry about. If nothing else, this photograph made it all too clear that this was a beloved man dying of a dread disease in the arms of a suffering family.

        

*For those who have read the earlier volumes of My Queer Cinema will recall, the pietà has long been image associated with gay suffering, most commonly invoked in the 1940-60s, type A films of the “coming out” genre.