This absence of photographic evidence for 14 years is a very serious matter. And to call it serious is not something dissident scientists dreamt up to make life difficult for the HIV experts. Long before the AIDS era leading retrovirologists themselves recorded that electron microscopic photographic evidence is essential to proving the existence of retroviruses. If you didn’t have photographs you didn’t know whether what your cultures produced passed all the tests that proved the existence of a retrovirus. Seeing is believing. You might have nothing. And even if you could establish the existence of impure particles you thought were a retrovirus, you still had to purify it otherwise cellular proteins and virus proteins stay mixed up. You need the virus proteins to do the antibody tests. Otherwise you’re testing for antibodies with the wrong proteins. This problem sufficiently worried a French investigative journalist named Djamel Tahi who interviewed Montagnier en camera at the Pasteur Institute on July 18th 1997. He asked Montagnier "why no pictures of purified virus"?