Photomontage has had a distinctly modern history. Usually its invention is credited to Dadaists like Raoul Hulsenbeck and John Heartfield, who used the medium for political and social statements they believed no other art could achieve.
Also called photocollage, this art of imaginatively combining photographic images with strong verbal statements was chosen by Linda Troeller because, as she explains, collage has the ability to "layer realities, time, events, memory."
The object of Troeller's kind of photomontage is to reach both the intellect and the emotions for the greatest possible impact. It is used to encourage recognition, evoke empathy and sympathy, and to persuade society to discard its biases and its mindless cruelties.
The realities Troeller decided to communicate through metaphoric and symbolic collages are painful because they remind us not only of our own mortality but of the terrors of unknown and unexpected contagions.
These terrors are not new, and artists through the centuries have depicted ultimate human misfortunes. In Hans Holbein's "The Dance of Death," to name only one famous Renaissance series, death surprises lovers in mid-embrace, snatches bishops from their opulent dinners, fells innocent peasants plowing their fields. Some of the smitten are knaves; others are saints. Death plays no favorites, makes no gender, or ethnic, or class distinctions.
Our common fate, however, does not terrify us as much as the lingering obscenity of diseases incurring social isolation, stigmatization, physical disfigurement, helpless weakness, and ultimate dissolution.
Through an intelligent juxtaposition of the once-fearsome scourge of tuberculosis with the present-day plague of AIDS, Linda Troeller offers us an historical context by which we can discover a sense of perspective, and judge that there is always hope. She does this with neither horror nor sentimentality, although TB has personal meanings for her.
In 1933, when her mother contracted the disease, TB was a devastating plague, still responsible for one of the highest mortality rates in America. Tuberculosis — "the white plague" — was the most widespread and feared illness in the nineteenth century. Yet it is now controllable by antibiotics like streptomycin.
We can hope for a similar, but swifter, resolution for AIDS. We must hope, but we can also be aware of the complex interactions among social and economic conditions, between science and medicine, between public health and public ignorance. As Susan Sontag observed in Illness as Metaphor, "Historians of medicine have sensitized us to the reality that the course of an epidemic is shaped not just by the infectious organism and the medical response but also by the historical setting within which it occurs."
With what Troeller calls "an art that is not panic-stricken," an art that is document, not polemic, the TB-AIDS DIARY invites us to behave more rationally, more patiently, more honorably. She does not spare her fictive characters — a young woman in a glowing white nightgown in the TB series, a pale young man, bathrobe-clad, in the AIDS series. They exist in isolated worlds which contrast them to family snapshots, surround them with masks, or stamp them explosively INFECTED. Dried flowers, her mother's snapshots and words from her diary, intermingle with words like passion, passion, passion (both diseases having been identified, incorrectly, with physical lusts), or the daily incantations of cough, spit up blood, cough, spit up blood, cough, spit up blood.
Troeller's photomontages partake of a dream-like vividness. Their mythic beauty, sensitivity, and visual drama stay in the memory. Their simple words echo in the imagination. What she has achieved is an art that insinuates both information and emotion into our consciousness."
(This essay by the late Estelle Jussim appeared originally in the catalogue of a two-person show held at the Art Gallery, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Pomona, NJ, Feb. 19 - March 20, 2002. This exhibition included the TB-AIDS DIARY and Paola Ferrario's "Inheritance: the Elder Relatives Series." The essay is reprinted here by permission of the estate of Estelle Jussim. © Copyright 2002 by Estelle Jussim. All rights reserved.