Morning kisses… This tender moment features in a new monograph by the American artist Eric Rhein, and is one in a poignant selection of self-portraits and photographs of friends and lovers, captured after Rhein’s diagnosis with HIV in the 1980s. The images are “as seductive as they are harrowing”, writes Emily Gosling in her feature on the book. “The intimacy that imbues [them] is so potent that the viewer almost feels accidentally voyeuristic—that we’ve seen something that’s not for us, and it’s time to turn away. But their privacy gives way to the universality of tragedy and the agony of loss, and of the beauty of vulnerability, and just being alive.”
