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40 ans de photojournalisme

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This image is taken from Michel Setboun’s third book about agencies. Eighty reporters were chosen to comment on one iconic image  taken during their careers. The image we’re publishing today is a picture by Alon Reininger. Every week we’ll be publishing an image from the book along with its accompanying text.

Since the 1980s, AIDS has killed more than 20 million people worldwide. But at the beginning of the epidemic, the American government and the media regarded the disease as a “gay plague,” primarily affecting New York. Few articles were written about it. Alon Reininger, a nurse during his military service in Israel, was the first photographer to give the disease a human face. Alarmed by its spread, thanks to the theatre of Larry Kramer, cofounder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and founder of Act Up, Reininger turned his focus to AIDS before it was identified as such. He met Ken Meeks, a friend of Kramer’s and a gay rights activist, in 1985, at his wedding. It was one of the first gay marriages in the United States! In October 1986, Meeks, then 45, was dying of AIDS in San Francisco, where he had moved.

“Years passed before the American public took an interest in AIDS and understood that the problem wasn’t just a problem for the New York gay community,” writes Reininger in American Photo for the 20th anniversary of the photograph. “It’s frightening to see the bigotry and narrow-mindedness that people showed the victims of the disease. The ways in which AIDS patients were treated in the early 1980s would become subject of study for historians. It is a shameful page in American history.”

Marie Cousin

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