Photographs as advocates of hope

Positive Lives represents one of the first and most original efforts to connect artistic imagination with photo advocacy. In this respect it reflects a deep understanding of the expectation and demands for respect and dignity voiced by people living with AIDS since the 1980s. Many somewhat infamous renditions of victims and misery in such well-known periodicals as Time magazine have documented the ravages of the dual effects of poverty and HIV and AIDS. However, Positive Lives does not reproduce the accounts of suffering, passivity, ignorance and stigma which have dominated the representations of women living with HIV and AIDS, especially in Africa.

The wonderful collection of photos presented here envisions the possibility that powerful, as it is, the virus and accompanying hardship has not displaced the ingenuity and agency of people and groups at the local level. In pursuing this work, the photographers were specifically trying to depict crucial and inspiring avenues of hope.

Patterns of inequality by gender and income have shaped the opportunities for people around the world to prevent or treat HIV and AIDS. However, such conditions are neither natural nor unchanging; they are the product of historical processes. In order to begin to explain the possibilities for agency among poor people in fighting the epidemic, we must understand the legacies of colonialism, and the injuries of class and racism as well as the cultural, social and gendered situations which have limited or shaped people's collective and individual endeavours to protect themselves.

Since the mid-1990s social movements have emerged all over the world as women and men have worked to change their own situations. Embedded in these photos from South East Asia to southern Africa is the essential recognition of people infected and affected with HIV and AIDS as powerful actors and agents of their own transformation. It is this inspiration that Positive Lives helps us to remember in the battle against HIV and AIDS.

Ida Susser, PhD
Professor of anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center
Adjunct professor of Socio-Medical Sciences at the HIV Center, Columbia University.
Author of numerous articles on the structuring of poverty and on gender and HIV and AIDS in New York City, Puerto Rico, and southern Africa.