AIDS,

1988

Leatherdale is best known for his work from the 1980s in which he photographed celebrities only to conceal their faces in shadow, relying instead on body position, composition, and framing to shape the narrative. He drew on that approach in this photograph of Stephen Reichard, one of the co-founders and directors of Art Against AIDS, an important effort on the part of the visual-arts community to raise awareness and funds for the fight against AIDS at the worst of the epidemic. Posing Reichard’s emaciated body in dramatic lighting, Leatherdale evoked the dignity and pathos of his subject, whose late-stage disease is highlighted by raking light that reveals the lesions on his face. Reichard died at age thirty-nine, only a few months after this image was taken.