Photo-Textual Relations: Emphasizing Vulnerability to Efface AIDS

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.