Hung Out to Dry

These are portraits of friends of mine who all died horrible gruesome deaths from AIDS, many of them in the 80s and 90s, early on in the pandemic when there was so much stigma and mystery around the disease. Many of them retracted from society and often from their friends, so that no one knew exactly where they went, or when they died exactly. Only decades later would some information be found on the internet, in obituaries or posts from friends. Many were even rejected and disowned by their own families. I had always wanted to memorialize them in photographs, and experimented with various approaches, until one day I used expired materials which I often use in my process of reuse, repurpose and recycle. With a lot of testing, I realized I could manipulate the scanned images (as I had taken all these photos on film obviously) to manipulate the amount of density in certain areas of the image, resulting in somewhat controlled ink flow. However, this process also had its own mind. Even if I were to print the same image exactly the same way, the results would be quite different. I titled the series “Hung Out to Dry” , a common expression meaning “to be in a very difficult situation where you have been abandoned by the people who previously supported you.” Second, due to the abundance of the additional inks I needed to hang the prints to cure and dry for as long as three or four months. The curator at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, who exhibited these named them “The Crying Portraits”