Shortly before his death, Jorge Zontal asked the artist AA Bronson to take these photographs of his emaciated body. “Jorge’s father had been a survivor of Auschwitz,” Bronson recalls, “and he had the idea that he looked exactly as his father had on the day of his release. He wanted to document that similarity, that family similarity of genetics and disaster.” Born Slobodan Saia-Levy in an Italian internment camp in 1944, Jorge was one of three members of General Idea, a now-legendary artist collective formed in 1969 with Bronson and Felix Partiz. Their collaboration ended in 1994, when both Felix and Jorge died of AIDS.

Though this triptych is a bleak portrait of a dying man, Jorge’s poses also subtly recall a demure pin-up. This theatrical gesture captures the extraordinary wit and satire that defined General Idea’s projects. Bronson writes: “We transformed our bodies into props, significations manipulated to create an image, a reality. We made of ourselves the artists we wanted to be.”