Bill Jacobson

This photograph of a young man seated on a bed opens up to a multitude of meanings, but its very ambiguity suggests impermanence. Prior to this series, photographer Bill Jacobson had explored the defocused photograph in numerous bodies of work. While these works were not necessarily about HIV/AIDS, they were initially informed by the loss of friends in the 1980s and 1990s.

In an interview for a Smithsonian oral-history project on the AIDS epidemic, Jacobson explained: “I think it has much more to do with the fact that landscape, people, buildings, places, architecture, you know, all of it is temporal. All of it is here for a brief period of time in the greater scheme of things. And really, ultimately, as much as the work was influenced by what was going on around me and having friends who were sick and who were dying . . . the work was about something actually very different.”