In 1987, Linda Troeller — whose photographic work at that point was primarily documentary in nature — turned her efforts to a more autobiographical project. Working in the form of photo–collage, she began to explore the issues of contagious disease and stigma, along with their impact on the human imperative of community. These concerns, which the emergence of the AIDS crisis had foregrounded in her consciousness, were linked to her own family history.
The materials with which she began experimenting were both highly personal and historical: the journals, letters and snapshots of her mother Marion, who in the 1930s had been institutionalized with tuberculosis, the so–called "white plague," yet survived and was then still living (she died in 2001); dried rose petals from the funeral wreath of her father Raymond, a disabled veteran whose crippling war wound had left him unable to work and thus socially invisible in their home town.
"I grew up in a household where I experienced stigma," Troeller recalls. "I saw that stamina is required to endure it. My parents relied on unconditional family love to sustain that stamina. Many people with AIDS and those diagnosed HIV+ are not near their family and friends or else have none. This disease asks the world community to offer unconditional love." Drawing on those memories of her life at home with her parents,as well as on her mother's experiences in the sanatorium and her own resultant empathy with the plight of AIDS sufferers as reported widely in the press, she produced a sequence of ten collages which she titled TB DIARY.
"After finishing the series on TB, I'd thought the project was complete," Troeller says. "I believed the parallel with AIDS, though unstated, was obvious." But then she was encouraged by artist David Hockney to turn it into a book, and urged by author Eric Marcus to think about expanding the work by including the diary of an AIDS patient or mother of a son with AIDS. Marcus gave her the name of Barbara Cleaver, the founder of a Mothers of AIDS Patients group in California, who, "after extensive correspondence and phone conversations, sent me her handwritten speeches, notes on her son Scott's illness and death, and some family snapshots."
When these arrived in 1988, Troeller was in severe pain from a multiply fractured wrist. Nonetheless, she set to work on a second series of assemblages. "The pain and incapacity put me further in touch with my project; even if only on a small scale, it gave me a clearer sense of what it means to become disabled," she remembers. "I couldn't do anything with my hand; I couldn't even work the film–advance lever on my camera. So my picture–making had to take other forms."
These AIDS–related images parallel the TB saga, making explicit the relationship between the two diseases, the recurrence of contagious illness as a medical phenomenon, and the continuity of ostracism and stigmatization as a panickedcultural reaction. As with the earlier images, each new collage in the series had as its base a black–and–white photograph, over which Troeller layered various materials: text, handwritten on X–ray film with pen and ink and grease pencil; relevant mass–media material; 3–D objects; and other items, all glued down to form one–of–a–kind works.
The resulting AIDS-related images parallelled the TB saga, making explicit the relationship between the two diseases, the recurrence of contagious illness as a medical phenomenon, and the continuity of ostracism and stigmatization as a panicked cultural reaction. Taken together, the two sequences form a song of compassion, tolerance, and hope, sung in full awareness of our ongoing societal confrontation with the biological riddle of the current plague. Troeller named the expanded project the TB-AIDS DIARY.
The conversion of these collages to photographic prints with a unified surface "happened in an unforeseen way," according to the photographer. "Someone in New York wanted to see the work, but with my broken wrist I couldn't drive a sample collage into the city, and I didn't want to trust it to the mails. So I had a color copy made on the Industrial Ilford Color Copier, a photocopy machine which uses Cibachrome paper. The flat lens of the copier blended the various collage parts into the Ciba paper surface, which appealed to me. This convinced me the collages could work in that form.
"That led to my receiving a materials grant from Ilford, which enabled me to finish twelve Cibacopy sets of the whole project. Then Polaroid got interested; their Artist's Grant Program provided me with two full days in their New York City studio to work with their 20x24 camera, plus enough materials for four sets of 20 prints. As a result, I've been able to develop two versions of a traveling show." Transforming the work to two dimensions also made possible its wide dissemination through the popular press (daily and weekly newspapers, Sunday supplements, and monthly magazines), thereby dramatically increasing its social impact and political effectiveness.
Troeller's project has been featured not only in art/photography periodicals and the gay press but also in the Sunday magazine of the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Newsday, and has served as a centerpiece for discussion at several medical and holistic-health conferences here and abroad. Presently it's being circulated by the Rhode Island Department of Health to sensitize medical personnel to the issue of stigmatization; and its recent exhibition in Finland influenced the government there to pass more liberalized entry laws covering HIV-positive foreigners.
This is of particular importance to Troeller because she believes that the current state of the AIDS epidemic calls for "an art that is not panic–stricken, not accusatory, and not limited to certain population groups." It was for that reason that she adopted a commonplace, vernacular format for the work in the first place. "With the overall scrapbook style of the piece — the fragmented diaristic text, the snapshots, and the references to the past — I tried to make the finished work accessible to a broad audience. It's my hope that the parallels between the social responses to AIDS and TB can be emotionally received without scaring the viewer away with explicit images of death, dying, lesions and such," she explains.
"We need to remember that the culture overcame TB. Many people today are dying of AIDS, but even more are living with AIDS — and some are surviving AIDS, for reasons we have not yet discovered. So there is always cause for hope."
(Author's note: This essay was originally drafted as the wall text for the group exhibition "Testimonies: Photography and Social Issues" that I curated for Houston Fotofest International 1990. It first appeared in print in European Photography 11:4, October-December 1990, in both English and German. It appeared in Greek translation in Photographia 12, March-April 1991.)
© Copyright 1990 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. By permission of the author and Image/World Syndication Services, imageworld@nearbycafe.com.