the humanity of the AIDS crisis: the ward by gideon mendel
colorized by me
Never forget 🏳️🌈😔
OP you did a beautiful job colourising these shots
Notice how OP says “colorized?”
I want to remind you this was the eighties. THE EIGHTIES. Color cameras existed. Color VIDEO CAMERAS existed.
Someone put these in black and white to make them seem long ago and far away.
OP is returning them to their proper place in history: ONLY TWO GENERATIONS AGO.
that’s not fair to gideon mendel, the photographer who took those photos in 1993. he took them in black-and-white even though color cameras were available, yes, but not to “make them seem long ago and far away”. he was photographing in black-and-white so they would be taken seriously.
mendel is still documenting and lifting up the voices of people who live with hiv/aids in the project “through positive eyes”.
if mendel hadn’t taken these photographs, we wouldn’t have a record of these patients and the ends of their lives at all. it was extremely unusual for aids wards to let photographers in, and the patients took a risk in letting mendel photograph them and their loved ones.
rest in peace, andré, steven, and john.
