Archive/Journal: 1985-1995/2001 is a two-volume title in a slipcase bringing together two related bodies of work: Volume 1, "Archive 1985-1995," reproduces approximately 80 black-and-white photographs made of the NYC Pride marches during the height of the AIDS epidemic from 1985 to 1995. Volume 2: "Journal: 1985-2001" focuses on personal narratives culled from Cianni's journals, and visual stories of lovers and friends who were living with or who died from AIDS, reflecting on his journey with HIV and his experience with activism surrounding HIV/AIDS from the same period as the Pride photographs.
Many Paths to the Same Place
Essay by Miss Rosen
If all the world is a stage, the street is where legends are made. Here, amidst the ebb and flow of controlled chaos, great swaths of flesh and machine are cast against a monumental landscape of concrete, glass, and steel. Whether guided by desire, ambition, survival, or simple happenstance, those who traverse its glittering sidewalks and windswept curbs may be overcome by the feeling of cinéma vérité come to life. For the photographer, the camera is a natural extension of the hand, much as the painter’s brush, sculptor’s chisel, and writer’s pen. Photography, like the street, is imbued with the aura of infinite possibility, where anything might happen and so often does.
Vincent Cianni first discovered the hypnotic blend of power, pageantry, and public space at the age of eight. In 1960, John F. Kennedy hit the Presidential campaign trail in a convertible for a meet and greet unlike any before or since. Understanding optics better than most, the senator from Massachusetts set a course for Old Forge, a tiny coalmining town in northeast Pennsylvania that the Ciannis called home. As the motorcade cruised down Main Street and Kennedy’s convertible slowed to a roll, Cianni’s father set his son in front of the Democratic contender, who shook the young boy’s hand. It was a simple but profound gesture that gave a deeper understanding of the inextricable connection between 5 6 7 politics, personal agency, and the performance of everyday life.
As the ’60s progressed, the machinations of the state split the nation into warring camps, pitting fascists against resistance with a fervor that hadn’t been seen since the Allies fought the Axis in World War II. Coming of age against a backdrop of upheaval, uprising, and counterinsurgency, Cianni witnessed the imperial boomerang hit its mark at home, as then-President Richard Nixon introduced the “war on drugs” to systematically target Black, Latino, and leftist communities nationwide.1 Working as a community organizer while pursuing his studies in social politics and public policy at Pennsylvania State University during the early 1970s, Cianni saw the immediate, material impact of advocacy in the lives of those pushed to the edge. He brought this awareness to an emerging love for photography, positioning himself as artist, activist, and advocate against the relentless tide of fascism.
Following his father’s death in 1979, Cianni locked in, embarking on a fivedecade career as personable and profound as the man himself. Getting his start as a working artist just as the medium finally began to shatter the exclusionary realm of fine art, he developed clearly defined projects exploring themes of identity, partnership, family, community, and tradition. Cianni carried a camera everywhere because how could he not, photography so intrinsically intertwined with his experience of life that it served as his visual diary. But as days turned to weeks and months to years, the notes in the margins disappeared from view—until time simply ceased to exist as it was known in 2020.
That March, SARS-CoV-2 skyrocketed around the globe to become one of the top five pandemics (and counting) of all time,2 bringing the world to a standstill in a way that nothing else ever could. New York’s teeming streets were empty; all life had seemingly stopped as if all of humanity was now cast in the first episode of The Twilight Zone. The past echoed with a resounding thud, the other shoe dropping, though few knew it in the moment.3 But many, like Cianni, recognized we had been here before: abandoned by the government and charged to stop a plague on our own. He returned to the photographs he had made on the streets of New York during Pride at the height of AIDS, a time and a place when showing up and showing out had the power to save lives.
Since it first made headlines in 1981, AIDS has become the third most deadly pandemic in human history, with 44 million dead as of 2025.4 Much like SARSCoV-2, the early years of AIDS were marked by taboo that resulted in a cavalcade of bigotry, medical disinformation, and institutional silence. When Cianni made the earliest photographs in this book, then-President Ronald Reagan had not so much as uttered the word “AIDS,” leaving it to his press secretary, Larry Speakes, to lob homophobic jokes during press pools throughout the early ’80s.5
From the moment the first brick was thrown at Stonewall, the battle lines between the state and the people were clear. “No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us,” trans activist Marsha P. Johnson famously said. But for those whose privilege relies on the subjugation of others, universal human rights pose an existential threat to a rigged playing field. Christofascist proponents of empire unleashed a counterinsurgency movement that billed itself as the “Moral Majority.” With their backing, Reagan and his successor, former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, transformed the White House into a citadel of neoliberalism. AIDS was the litmus test by which humanity was judged; the merchants of bigotry reveling in disease, disability, and death were nothing but garden-variety eugenicists, then as now.
Pride, always a political act, became a lifeline, a place where people came together as one in real space and time. How to Stop a Plague, Step 1: Organize. Step 2: Boots on the ground. Vincent Cianni heard the call, and he came, camera in hand, knowing that being fully present meant bearing witness with an open heart, a free spirit, a beautiful smile, twinkling eyes, and quite possibly cut-off shorts. He became the consummate observer/ participant as he moved through the crowds, the camera a choreography of hand, eye, and spirit. But it is in the seeing and being seen, the primal call and response between photographer and photographed, that Cianni is his truest self.
Being is presence, and presence is political in a state that would just as soon leave you for dead. To hold space for this presence, when so many have been lost, lies at the heart of Archive 1985–1995: a panoramic portrait of community as seen from the inside looking out, which comes together like spokes on a wheel as many paths to the same place.
Miss Rosen
Miss Rosen is a New York–based writer focusing on art, photography, and cultural history. Her work has been published in books by Janette Beckman, Joe Conzo, Martha Cooper, and Arlene Gottfried, as well as publications including The New Yorker, The Village Voice, i-D, Dazed, and AnOther.
Vincent Cianni
Vincent Cianni is a documentary photographer, educator, and activist who explores social justice through image, text, and audio. He was adjunct associate professor at the Parsons School of Design for thirty years and the founder and director of the Newburgh Community Photo Project, a grassroots community photo workshop in Newburgh, NY.
His book We Skate Hardcore was published by NYU Press and the Center for Documentary Studies in 2004, and a major survey was exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York in 2006. Gays in the Military (GITM) was published by Daylight Books in May 2014 and was featured in the New York Times Sunday Review and The Katie Couric Show. He presented GITM at TEDxUniversityofNevada (2015), and the Archive for Documentary Arts (Duke University) established a study archive of his documentary photographs in 2007.
Cianni’s photographs appear in numerous anthologies and online magazines, are exhibited nationally and internationally, and are represented in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; the Library of Congress; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; George Eastman House; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of the City of New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
