A #tbt interview with photographer J. Tomas Lopez

Here’s an article I wrote for the now-defunct A&U Magazine, an interview with photographer J. Tomas Lopez in which he talks about “[daring] people to look the early pandemic in the eye.” Check it out:

Dare Look

Capturing faces of AIDS, photographer J. Tómas López dares people to look the early pandemic in the eye
by Alina Oswald

It all started with an Agfa 35mm German photo camera that J. Tomás López received from his father, an amateur photographer, back in 1961. Growing up in Long Island, New York, López would often travel to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where his father rented a cottage for the family, and where, as a child, the now-professor of photography at the University of Miami would use the camera and have fun taking many pictures.

“…photography [for them] became this amazing cathartic narrative.”

Photographer J. Tomas Lopez

But then it came time for López to go to college, to study psychology and philosophy. “I didn’t think about taking pictures,” he tells me over the phone, “and then I got drafted into the Army.” He did an internship at Bellevue Hospital, in New York City. From there, he was assigned to Moncrief General Hospital, Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where he was to treat returning Vietnam war veterans, who were still in the military but had hard drug addictions. “They all came back with cameras, Nikons and Minoltas that were very inexpensive at the PX in Vietnam,” López recalls, “and what I noticed was that they would talk only about the pictures that [they’d taken while in Vietnam, developing their film in a darkroom on the base].” Some of the Vietnam vets had had experiences so horrifying that they thought they’d lost their souls, and so their photographs became the only way through which they could communicate. “And I realized that photography [for them] became this amazing cathartic narrative,” López adds.

Read more here.

PS:

Also, since yesterday was June 5, the National Long-Term HIV & AIDS Survivors Awareness Day here in the U.S., here are two of my images photographed for A&U in 2013 during a press event, at the AIDS in NY: The First Five Years exhibition.

Also, check out a few of my own images documenting this decades-long pandemic.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

Alina Oswald