Kathy Vargas

The AIDS Series, titled Oracion: Valentine’s Day/Day of the Dead
When AIDS became a part of our lives, I realized that Roland Barthes was right when he said, “With the photograph we enter into flat death.”
I began to lose friends. The first was a former “boss” from my days as an arts writer. As editor of a major newspaper, he’d fought for equal rights and a voice in the press for Latinos. But thinking that a gay man wouldn’t be allowed to run a major newspaper in Texas, he stayed in the closet, fighting for everyone’s rights but his own. When he got AIDS he kept it a secret, didn’t seek treatment, and died.
Once he was gone, I photographed his absence, knowing that somewhere under the ground his flesh was turning to lace. Barthes gave me permission to remember life beyond death, and to equate memory with resurrection, for he tells us: “The Photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed…to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium…. And if photography belonged to a world with some residual sensitivity to myth we should exult over the richness of the symbol: the beloved body is immortalized by the mediation of a precious metal, silver…”
This series was literally a moving down the absent body as it turned to bone and was recently reconfigured as a cross. As other friends died they were also remembered in this series. It’s title is a reference to this disease’s capacity to kill someone simply for loving.
Barthes was right when he said: “Always the photograph astonishes…with an astonishment which endures and renews itself inexhaustibly. Perhaps this astonishment, this persistence, reaches down into the religious substance out of which I am molded; nothing for it: photography has something to do with resurrection.”