The Epidemic without Faces: The Unique Soviet Photoshoot of HIV+ People

• In Event: Perestroika and Its Queer Discontents: Mobilizing Social Advocacy in the Late Soviet Union

Abstract

This paper analyzes the unique photoshoot that was made by the photographer Valery Khristoforov (TASS News Agency) in the Infectious Diseases Hospital № 2 in Moscow in March 1990. Khristoforov’s footage, shot over two weeks, became the first, and perhaps the only, visual evidence of the pain and suffering of the HIV+ people, whom the “decent” Soviet citizens had most likely never seen, but whom they certainly feared, condemned, and despised. Soviet photographers were generally not allowed to take pictures of HIV+ people or the hospital staff. Khristoforov’s rare visual evidence allows us to better understand the plight of Soviet citizens living with HIV and dying of AIDS on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Author

• Ekaterina Suverina, U of Konstanz (Germany)