Photo-Textual Relations: Emphasizing Vulnerability to Efface AIDS

Victoria Oana Lupașcu

doi:10.3390/h9020034

Abstract

This article considers the relationship between photojournalism and literature about HIV/AIDS in Romania from the late 1980s and the 1990s to examine the ways in which photo-textual relations localize and perpetuate a specific ideological understanding of the AIDS epidemic. The pictures taken by Frank Fournier in Bucharest won the Word Press Photo’s first prize in 1990 and established the AIDS epidemic’s image in and about Romania. Using Diana Taylor’s concept of percepticide to think about what the photographs simultaneously reflect and obscure through an active training of the audience’s gaze, in tandem with Lynn Mie Itagaki’s theorization of visuality of vulnerability as a biopolitical heuristic, I examine the photographs performative erasure of AIDS alongside Rodica Mătușa’s (semi) autobiography, Nobody’s Angels. My Life Alongside Children Living with AIDS. The close-up pictures of malnourished children in a dilapidated hospital have a gritty, abrasive texture that perform a defacing function and dehumanize the central subject. The short descriptions accompanying Fournier’s work, alongside Mătușa’s book, present the images as illustrations and consequences of the Romanian communist regime’s biopolitical measures and tie the medical emergency to the communist ideology. The texts and the photographs impose a methodology of looking, of reading and seeing as evidence of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s austerity measures in the late 1980s in Romania, while the centrality of infants’ naked, malnourished bodies fabricate a causal relationship that obscures larger medical and cultural networks. I claim that image-text interrelations instrumentalize and localize the AIDS epidemic by visually emphasizing vulnerability as a direct result of communism, while dehumanizing and effacing the infants’ and children’s bodies.

Highlights

Familiarizing the Unspeakable in the HospitalsHIV/AIDS, all over the world and especially before the advent of antiretroviral medication, dramatically changed medical care practices, and narrative strategies of representation among other phenomena. Doctor Rodica Mătus, a, among the very few medical doctors who were actively engaged with the seropositive children from the onset of the epidemic until the present day, openly acknowledges the ways in which fear and censorship, as well as lack of knowledge about this new virus and its manifestations, have impacted care practices until the middle of the 1990s: Încrîncenarea lor în îngrijirea cu dragoste a unor copii străini, bolnavi, care arătau atît de rău, încît nu-t, i venea nici să-i atingi, a fost una dintre primele uimiri ale noastre, ale românilor
HIV/AIDS in Romania from the late 1980s and the 1990s to examine the ways in which photo-textual relations localize and perpetuate a specific ideological understanding of the AIDS epidemic
Frank Fournier, a French photographer working for Contact Press Images in the United States, went to Romania at the end of 1989 to document the pediatric AIDS epidemic in the aftermath of the fall of the communist regime in December of the same year

Summary

Familiarizing the Unspeakable in the Hospitals

HIV/AIDS, all over the world and especially before the advent of antiretroviral medication, dramatically changed medical care practices, and narrative strategies of representation among other phenomena. Doctor Rodica Mătus, a, among the very few medical doctors who were actively engaged with the seropositive children from the onset of the epidemic until the present day, openly acknowledges the ways in which fear and censorship, as well as lack of knowledge about this new virus and its manifestations, have impacted care practices until the middle of the 1990s: Încrîncenarea lor în îngrijirea cu dragoste a unor copii străini, bolnavi, care arătau atît de rău, încît nu-t, i venea nici să-i atingi, a fost una dintre primele uimiri ale noastre, ale românilor. Despite a large number of children receiving medical visas to be studied and “helped” in the US, the HIV/AIDS epidemic took over the news and put a brake on the international adoption fever, but not on humanitarian interventions into Romania During these interventions, as described by Mătus, a, US nationals brought in supplies (some necessary and some unnecessary) and a routine of care unfamiliar to Romanian doctors Performing care by hugging emaciated children, regardless of their appearance, changed perception of AIDS in hospitals, the interactions between doctors and patients, and materialized what Cartwright calls the “politics of pity” into pedagogical endeavors of care during an epidemic (Cartwright 2005) In this respect, American volunteers and doctors have made an impact in the ways in which doctor Mătus, a and her colleagues reformed their practices. Performing care and narrating care instantiate attempts of domesticating the “unspeakable” (Butler 2004) in hospitals and society at large

Training Readers

Containing the Epidemic through Images

Visuality and Agency

Conclusions