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The Scent of Positive Lives: (Re)Memorializing Our Loved Ones

Australian Research Center in Sex, Health and Society La Trobe University, Melbourne

Aaron Kerner

San Francisco State University

This experimental piece, after establishing the mutual experience of the death of a loved one, explores the authors’experience of being involved in and attending the international photographic exhibition Positive Lives that documents the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS and those that care and support them. This article focuses on one of the stories, Andrew Knox, the primary author’s partner, who died with AIDS dementia. Relating to those who suffer the symptoms of dementia confronts us with a terrifying thought: we too might forget. Using Barthes’s text Camera Lucida, the authors turn to the use of photographs from Positive Lives and personal snapshots as a way to memorialize those they have loved and lost. What was once a personal and individual memory, the primary author’s experience of her partner’s life and death with HIV/AIDS, is now shared and "entangled" within the cultural and collective memory and history of HIV.

Key Words: Roland Barthes • AIDS dementia • photography • death • (re)memorializing

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