“I’m Going To Do It Myself Today”
The moment is etched in memory: a young man, near death, asking for a final act of agency. He was covered in Kaposi’s lesions, barely able to move, and yet something in him refused to be erased. With quiet determination, he gave himself a bath — not for hygiene, but for dignity. The nurse, stunned by his clarity and grace, watched as caregiving became witnessing. That moment would return to the nurse, decades later, as a dream — and then, as this photograph.
The Last Hug reenacts a true event from the height of the AIDS crisis. It blends memory and projection — both literal and emotional — to collapse time and collapse roles: the patient and caregiver, the past and the present, the living and the lost. Every image in this series is a portrait of more than one person.
The work is quiet on the surface, but layered with tension, tenderness, and grief. It is a meditation on care, memory, mortality, and what remains when words have long since faded.