This project is based on a story told by a nurse — now in his seventies — who cared for patients dying of AIDS in the early 1990s. One particular patient, lucid and weak, asked to bathe himself the day before he died. The nurse helped prepare the room, then watched as the patient, naked, mottled, and proud, carefully washed his face, hands, chest, legs, and feet. It was, in his words, “the most dignified death I’ve ever seen.”
Years later, the nurse — now HIV-positive himself, having survived the epidemic — was haunted by the memory. In dreams, the patient returns, sometimes whole, sometimes spectral. In these images, the nurse plays both himself and the patient. Each photograph is a reenactment of that final bath — using projections of real archival textures, hospital objects, and handwritten messages from memory. There are no digital composites. The projections are real, mapped onto the skin, the walls, the water.
This is a story about a single day. But it is also a story about how the dead live on in the skin of the living.