This project examines how photographing men living with HIV can explore the fragmentation and negotiation of identity shaped by illness, stigma, and lived experience. Through the studio-dialogic triptych Detect, the work investigates how photographic encounters can create conditions for empathy, presence, and recognition beyond surface representation. During the making of Manifold / Homography, a collaboration with researchers at the University of St Andrews and the Terrence Higgins Trust, the project engaged with affective touch, how physical contact, or its absence, impacts both body and mind, aligning with my ongoing interest in the multiplicity and fragmentation of identity.

The collaboration involved Billy, a THT volunteer living with HIV, whose studio-based portrait session was slow, dialogic, and attentive to mood, boundaries, and energy. In this co-authored process, subject and photographer negotiated presence, affect, and self-representation. The resulting medium-format photographs reveal layered exchanges, fragments that both separate and bind, reflecting the ongoing tension between physical embodiment, social perception, and selfhood for someone living with HIV.

Drawing on autopathographic practices of Morrisroe, Hujar, and Guibert, the project emphasizes relational portraiture and the experience of living with a chronic, stigmatized condition. Multiple exposure serves as a metaphor for psychic and bodily fragmentation, allowing identities to accumulate, shift, and partially reunite within a single frame. The photographs function less as documentation and more as atmospheres, inviting the viewer to dwell in the complexity and nuance of living with HIV.

Through this work, photography becomes a site for tracing touch, resonance, and distance, offering insight into the fragmented, resilient, and negotiated realities of HIV-positive identity, ultimately leaving an impression of the lived experience of illness, embodiment, and social visibility.