Artist, Lola Flash: My name is Lola Flash. I'm an artist who uses photography as a means to create an archive of my beloved community.
This is a portrait of my friend Charles sitting on a stool, hugging his legs, and in between the chin and his knee is a Band-Aid box. Charles has the Band-Aids over his body.
I used the cross-color process where I'm inverting all the colors. So, you know, this was before Photoshop, I created that process totally by mistake, by using the wrong paper. Charles is a dark-skinned guy, so he comes out light, and then the spots, since they're light, they come out dark. I was able to manipulate the color, so that they would become purple on his body because I wanted to speak about Kaposi's sarcoma, which is a skin cancer that a lot of people in the very beginning of AIDS got. It was just yet another stigma that made them want to be house bound, especially if they had spots on their faces.
Charles isn't here with us, he might even have been HIV positive at the time, but photography has a way of keeping people alive, in a sense. People think of people that had AIDS and died of AIDS as victims, and I suppose in some ways they were, but also there were so many heroes amongst them.