ART REVIEW : San Diego Photo Exhibit Bares Scourge of AIDS in Portrait Style

With a series of 32 1/4-by-32 1/2-inch photographs, photographer Rosalind Solomon has cut through the grim medical reality of AIDS to dip into the soothing strength of the human spirit.

As in her India portraits, nursing-home portraits of Mexico and Peru, and a series on the homeless in San Diego and New York, Solomon’s subject is humanity caught in inhumane circumstances. For “Portraits in the Time of AIDS,” which originated at the Grey Art Gallery in New York and continues through Saturday at UC San Diego’s Grove Gallery, Solomon avoided a photojournalistic style and chose instead a classical portrait approach.

A man, a woman, and their little boy sit close to one another on the same chair. The child looks troubled, but the woman’s expression of motherly love and affection surpasses his unease. The man looks away from the camera.

A couple, a young man and woman hug facing the camera. The burly man wears a blue jeans jacket. She wears a warm sweater. Neither is smiling, but on a tiny heart-shaped pendant suspended from her neck, we see the word “Love,” spelled in script. One of these two has AIDS. Which one we don’t know.

The images in “Portraits in the Time of AIDS” reveal that AIDS strikes not only homosexual men and intravenous drug users, but also babies and women, husbands, sons, sisters, mothers, fathers.

Solomon photographed her patients within their environments, whether at home, in a hospital room or elsewhere, and often with family and friends. We see family and friends coming to support some; others are seen withering in lonely rooms.

Solomon did not steer clear of the ugly lesions that sometimes blister AIDS patients. Several of the 45 images in the exhibit show faces and bodies discolored by grotesque blotches. One disorienting photo is of two bare feet, bumpy with carbuncles, a hand grasping a squash on the ground.

Few of these black-and-white photographs are “arty.” The photographer kept her artistry under tight rein in order to focus on relationships, getting at the human factor of how the patients and those in their lives have come to terms with this disease.

Relationships remain complex. One young man, his ear pierced by half a dozen earrings, stretches out provocatively on a hospital bed, his bare legs suggestively uncovered. In the background against the garish hospital curtains sits his mother. A woman who appears to be his sister looks forlornly at the man.

For another image, a body of water serves as a backdrop in which a young man, his face filled with dejection, turns to an older woman. He is fair-haired. His face is smooth and freckled. Her face is wrinkled, but filled with understanding and support.

Elsewhere, Solomon portrays a black man, half in shadow and half in an almost heavenly light. His palms are clasped and his mustached face has a radiant look.

In “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag wrote: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

In the tiny Grove Gallery, Solomon’s life-sized images quietly surround the viewers. The effect of their presence is to remind us that they are we and we are they.