Art Poster/Aids Poster is a series of 10 photographic self-portraits by the British photographer Richard Sawdon Smith that combines work form a variety of projects spanning the last 6 years. The original photographs were intended for the gallery wall as framed art prints but brought together in this series they have been transformed into fly posters that could be pasted around the town, or placed on the gallery wall, and make reference to the early responses by artists and activists to the AIDS crisis.
Sawdon Smith’s main area of practice in recent years has been an investigation into photographic representations of diseased and damaged bodies. The area of practice covers photographic self-portraiture and representations of ill health. Although primarily concerned with the HIV/AIDS body the research does also include investigation into artists who use representations of their own diseased or damaged body to explore various issues of ill health, identity and subjectivity.
The most recent series of photographs continue a body of work referencing the medical institution and medical imaging. A desire to reveal what is known to be hidden – the disease, the internal body, the workings of the institution, power/knowledge relations – yet every surface able to be torn reveals yet another surface, another plane of intensity for investigation.
Many of the images have overt references to the medical in terms of images (anatomical posters, x-rays) and objects (stethoscope, doctor’s gown, bandages) placed within the picture frame or worn. There is a question here of authority and appropriateness when the subject appears to be in control of the medical paraphernalia or where the doctor appears to also be the patient or vice-versa (Signs of Life, Listening to Myself), and a potential fetishisation of this paraphernalia. The history of AIDS has been defined by patient power, seeking out answers to understanding and treating an unknown disease, and groups such as Act Up used graphics and posters as an act of militancy to raise awareness of the issues facing those with HIV/AIDS. At times Sawdon Smith’s work is intentionally ambiguous in location, conflating the domestic space with the institutional. This conflating of space is used to emphasise the direct effect that medical and scientific discourse has on our relationship to our own bodies, and creates a more ambiguous reading of the images compared to the earlier work of Act Up.
The use of the internationally recognised symbol of the red ribbon, is in Sawdon Smith’s hands as much a remembrance to those who have died of AIDS as it is a critique of how this symbol has been institutionalised and appropriated too as a potentially insincere shorthand for institutions and businesses to appear as caring, while at the same time questions the definition of a person solely by their illness.
Sawdon Smith’s research proposes the possibility of photographic self-portraits of illness, that have shifted from an era of mourning and militancy associated with early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the West, as the management of the disease has shifted from an acute to a chronic illness, and offers alternative representation strategies that situate themselves between the alien or other and some ‘natural’ self or social structure, between recovery and discovery, visually between portraiture and performance.