Nan Goldin

 

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/goldin_nan.html

 wrote: 

“My art was the diary of my life.  I photographed the people around me.  I didn’t think of them as people with AIDS.  About ’85, I realized that many of the people around me were positive.  David Armstrong took an incredible picture of Kevin, his lover at the time, right before Kevin went into the hospital.  I photographed him when he was healthy.  At that stage, we still didn’t know very much.  There was a lot of ignorance.  We were very obsessed with what caused it:  There were all kinds of rumors, everything from amyl nitrate to bacon.  People were tested and being told they had something called ARC, that quickly became medically non-relevant.  I was in denial that people were going to die.  I thought people could beat it.  And then people started dying.

One of the ways I started becoming involved was through artist and activist Avram Finkelstein in ’86, ’87.  I’d become friends again with him, having known him when I was 18 and living with the drag queens in Boston in the early ’70s.  He was in art school then.  In the 1980s he became my hairdresser up at Sassoon.  He had helped start the Silence Equals Death Collective, which turned into Act Up.  He was one of the people who designed the logo Silence = Death, and the triangle.” - From this article written by Nan Goldin:

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0106/voices_goldin.htm