This thesis analyses the erotic, bodily, psychic, and pleasurable engagements with gay fine art photographic practices produced during the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis in the United States. Starting from exhibitions which have shaped critical discourse around gay sex, promiscuity, and AIDS-related mortality and loss, this thesis examines, often for the first time, the photographic practices of Jimmy DeSana, Ryan McGinley, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Steven Arnold. The questions which their works ask of us, and the demands we ask these works to meet are the subject of this inquiry. Adopting a psychoanalytic and poststructuralist methodological framework of analysis based on the Object Relations psychoanalysis of D.W. Winnicott and the late texts from Roland Barthes, this thesis argues for embodied forms of engagement with the photographic object, here understood as an object that is as visual as it is physically present in space.
This thesis brackets sexual pleasure in photographs produced during the HIV/AIDS crisis by emphasising an engagement with images through touching, playing, mirroring, and tasting. In so doing, this thesis positions itself in a domain which the widely different aims of postmodernist art criticism, neoconservative gay and straight voices, and AIDS activism alike have relegated to the childish positions of incapacity, infantility, and immaturity. Rather occupying a paranoically defensive position in response to this claims, this thesis reparatively inhabits them, promoting an often-aroused interaction with photography which occurs within the overlapping spaces between the Winnicottian mother with her child and between possible gay lovers. In these spaces, as psychic as they are physical, this thesis discusses a childish return to authoriality and originality as useful categories to mediate and to fill the separation between the photograph and its beholder.
