A review of Bearing Witness: People With AIDS, photographs by Nicholas Nixon and text by Bebe Nixon, Godine, $45, $25 paper

What Salman Rushdie was to the Ayatollah Khomeni, photographer Nicholas Nixon is to some AIDS activists. When Nixon's work-in-progress about People With AIDS was shown as part of his 1988 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, ACT UP members distributed leaflets calling for positive images of PWAs who are "vibrant, angry, loving, sexy, beautiful, acting up and fighting back." But the often powerfully grisly portraits that they found wanting in compassion and social context at a moment when little art about AIDS was being shown have been partly contextualized by other artists who approach the epidemic from more overtly idealizing or political perspectives. For People With AIDS, it is Nixon-and science journalist Bebe Nixon-who have done the contextualizing: they've augmented the pictures with essays based on interviews Bebe has been conducting since 1987 with PWAs and their loved ones.

Photographs and text jointly assume center stage in People With AIDS. Shot over time, the black-and-white close-ups-as many as 11 of a single subject-offer the increasingly emaciated bodies of PWAs, sometimes seen in informal poses with care-givers. These photos will be familiar to viewers of Nixon's exhibitions at MOMA and the Zabriskie Gallery, and the re-presentation of the pictures in the book is not likely to resolve the controversy about them. But the addition of words enlarges the emotional and intellectual range of the images and underscores the insufficiency of any documentary photograph to grapple with the complexity of AIDS.

The texts range widely in length and depth, and are sometimes complemented by interviews with parents and lovers. The Nixons' 15 interview-photo subjects came to them through an ad in Boston's AIDS Action Committee newsletter. They constitute a fortuitous cross section of the epidemic's toll: nine gay or bisexual men; three black and one Hispanic women (some of them-or their spouses-used intravenous drugs); a hemophiliac; and one PWA who refused to discuss the source of his infection. Their reasons for participating in the Nixons' project are largely unarticulated. Fourteen of them were dead by the time Nixon completed the project.

In these interviews, they verbalize many of the thoughts and feelings we might expect. Some rant against an uncaring society that has betrayed them, while others find spirituality late in life. Many contemplate suicide. Several intone that frighteningly universal mantra of the universally ill, "I'm not afraid of death, but I am afraid of dying."

These are all essential messages in a culture that regards PWAs as disposable and denies the inextricable relationship between living and dying. Such sentiments pale, however, beside the vivid thematically linked stories that People With AIDS presents. Stories about growing up in wildly varying circumstances during the 50s and 60s: Northeasterner Sara Paneto, now a counselor at a Providence detox center, attributes her weakened kidneys to her father's assault on her pregnant mother. "Me and my sisters," she observed, "we were physically, sexually, and psychologically abused from the day we first thought of life." Joey Brandon, by contrast, came from a blissfully supportive Indiana family that provided him with what he characterized as "the last real American childhood."

There are also stories about the energy and urgency that an AIDS diagnosis can catalyze. Donald Perham helped found the New Hampshire AIDS group. Paul Fowler planted a garden. Elizabeth Ramos sued her doctor for malpractice. There may be useful advice here for PWAs, too. Banker Donald Perham and actor Tony Mastrorilli regretted giving up their jobs too soon; George Gannett spoke revealingly about the role of the "perfect AIDS patient" and the denial of feelings it entails.

The most resonant stories in the book are invariably about families-biological and chosen. Parents and lovers put their lives on hold to nurse their children or mates. They describe traumas as different in scale as dining out while worrying about diarrhea or watching a loved one losing control of his mental faculties.

The Nixon's stated purpose was to record these PWAs' stories "with so much candor and so little cant that even total strangers might be moved." Have they succeeded? Their labor of love (proceeds will go to Boston's Hospice at Mission Hill) is immensely valuable: it helps humanize a crisis that hostility and inaction have turned into a global catastrophe and it gives PWAs a voice in articulating matters of personal and social concern. Unhappily, it also misses crucial opportunities to educate its readers.