Location: USA

At the height of the AIDS epidemic during the early 1990s, the Ambassador Hotel in San Francisco helped the overcrowded hospitals. Serving the poorest of the poor, housing those with nowhere to go and for whom nothing more could be done apart from daily doses of morphine. Padilla followed a doctor, nurse, and social worker who cared for the patients at the “AIDS Hotel.” When that was done, Padilla went back alone to interview and photograph the people she had gotten to know.

ABOUT DARCY PADILLA

Darcy Padilla is a documentary photographer. With a focus in narrative photography, she works on long-term projects about struggle and the trans-generational effects. She is an associate professor of art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member photographer of Agence VU’ Paris. Padilla’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship, Getty Images Grant, Canon Female Photojournalist Award, World Report Master Award, W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, and three World Press Photo Awards (first recipient for Long-Term Projects). Her photographs exhibited and published internationally with solo exhibitions at Visa pour l’image (France), DOCfield Festival (Spain), as well as the Festival of Ethical Photography and Cortona On The Move. Padilla’s monograph Family Love follows a family for 21-years — an intimate story of poverty, AIDS and social issues.