Chicago Tribune - February 3, 2005
Alan G. Artner, Tribune art critic

The most touching image was of Tom Moran, a former medical technician who lived with his mother.

We see him from behind, nude from the waist up. The spine protrudes from his emaciated body as he holds his hand up to the light from a large window. The light makes the hand look even thinner, otherworldly, but its gesture remains deeply human, suggesting benediction.

That image now reappears in "Pandemic: Imaging AIDS," the group exhibition of more than 100 photographers at the Chicago Cultural Center.

It is not a show for the fainthearted. A lot of what we see has the horror of photographs of survivors of concentration camps. But unlike some other works of art created under the impress of AIDS -- I think of the widely played First Symphony by John Corigliano -- few works here seem shallow or gratuitously theatrical.

The exhibition is, of course, propagandistic, insofar as it spreads images and firsthand accounts of the disease that are designed to promote action. And among the works of photographers from more than 50 countries, many function chiefly as posters or visual broadsides.

Yet because the works in the exhibition range over 20 years, an entire array of purposes is presented, from the simple immortalization of victims to treatments of grief and dying that have some of the complexity of high art.

This makes the exhibition somewhat easier to take, for most of us need to be braced for so much tugging at heartstrings. Raymond Depardon's image of orphans in a psychiatric hospital in Romania -- a pair of severely damaged toddlers, one with contorted face, pointing accusatorily at the viewer -- exists at just about one's limit.

But then there are also images of hope (Scott Thode), innocence (Steve Hart) and almost as many different scenes of caring and support as a viewer can imagine.

Interestingly, the inclusion of work by such once-controversial figures as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andreas Serrano does not add a great deal artistically to the exhibition. And, with the exception of Nan Goldin and Duane Michals, the bigger names on show -- Annie Leibovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Pierre et Gilles, Cindy Sherman -- do not contribute the most powerful or sensitive documents.

Instead, there are pieces by A.A. Bronson, Frank Fournier, Therese Frare, Alon Reininger and Michael A. Schwartz that cut so deeply that many will have to look away before trying to take them in again. And there is, too, that radiant picture by Nixon, in which a sufferer seems to reach a place miraculously beyond suffering, as if silently hovering between death and life.

This is, by turns, a stark and beautiful exhibition.

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"Pandemic: Imaging AIDS" will continue at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., through April 3; artist Nicholas Lowe gives a free gallery talk on the exhibition at 12:15 p.m. Thursday in the Center's fourth-floor exhibit hall.

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