Art Against Our Vanishing - Junge, Sophie

Nan Goldin’s 1989 exhibition “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” wasn’t really an exhibition in the clean, white-cube sense. It was more like walking into a room where grief had been made physical — photographs slapped on the wall not as art objects but as evidence, as screaming. The AIDS crisis wasn’t just killing people; it was erasing them, and the political silence around it felt like murder by neglect. This book, ART AGAINST OUR VANISHING, drags that moment back into the room with us, and it hasn’t lost any of its voltage.

You’re looking at work from the heart of that storm: David Wojnarowicz’s searing collages that feel like a punch to the throat. Peter Hujar’s portraits, so intimate they’re almost unbearable — these weren’t subjects, they were friends dying. Mark Morrisroe’s bruised, theatrical self-exposures. Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s staged moments humming with imminent loss. The East Village scene wasn’t a trendy art movement; it was a community under siege, making work because press releases and polite gallery statements were a sick joke. Goldin didn’t “curate” this show so much as she built a bunker for truth-telling.

What this book does, brutally well, is frame photography here not as a medium but as a moral act. These images were weapons — not for sale, but for survival. They forced viewers to witness what the government, what the media, what polite society was trying to ignore. The grainy prints, the raw emotion, the unflinching stares — it’s all a form of testimony. It says: We were here. We loved. We are vanishing. Look at what you’re allowing.

Honestly, it’s not an easy book to sit with. The anger in it is still hot. The sorrow hasn’t dated. But that’s the point — it’s not meant to be a historical archive filed away. It’s a mirror held up to a moment of collective failure and ferocious courage. And maybe, held up again now, it asks what we’re choosing to look at, or look away from, today.