Today is World AIDS day so this week’s choice of picture is one of Howard Hodgkin’s illustrations to Susan Sontag’s The Way We Live Now, a short but powerful work of fiction inspired by the AIDS epidemic that began to ravage New York in the early 1980s. Hodgkin read Sontag’s story when it was first published in the New Yorker in 1986 and responded to it very strongly: “I was astonished by it, in fact. I found it very moving and accurate and, unlike quite a lot of AIDS-inspired writing, not in the least bit sentimental. I rang Susan up in New York almost straight away and said how good I thought it was, and proposed that we make an illustrated edition of it.” The resulting collaboration was published in this country by Jonathan Cape in 1991, with all proceeds donated to AIDS charities in London and New York. The title of the illustration reproduced on this page is in touch checking in, although the artist tends to refer to it, simply, as “the telephone.” The image is an aquatint printed in two stages, one for each of the two principal colours, red and black, with the green of the telephone dial coloured in by hand.
The Way We Live Now tells the story of one AIDS sufferer’s descent into illness, but in a cleverly oblique way, through a kind of montage of conversations and exchanges that take place between his friends, family and ex-lovers. The ill man and the horror of what is happening to him are like a stone dropped into a pool of water, causing ever-widening ripples of sympathy, concern and anxiety. in touch checking in is the first picture to appear in the illustrated edition of the book and takes its title from...
