HIV-POSITIVE IN LOS ANGELES
Twelve Stories
These works are the result of a unique collaboration. Twelve student photographers, 12 student writers and 12 people living with HIV/AIDS worked together to create this collective portrait exploring the meaning of AIDS in Los Angeles in the year 2007.
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S., photography played a powerful role. This was often controversial as capable of fomenting stigma as well as the medium is generating activism.
Today the photography of AIDS is much less dramatic. The visual urgency has gone. The question we now face is ““ how might this medium be reenergized? What role might it play?
Each piece in this exhibition reflects the varying life circumstances and concerns of the HIV-positive subjects who so generously volunteered to share their lives.
South African photographer Gideon Mendel has played a leadership role as director of this project, and as contributor of the series of portraits that accompany the student works. He has spent much of the last thirteen years creating a body of work that documents the HIV/AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa.
Mendel’s work in Africa has increasingly involved the interplay of powerful imagery with his subjects’ written and spoken words. These ideas were the springboard for the student works and also for the sound installation.
Our aim here has been to create a new visual tool to fight complacency. With a million people living with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. today and a growing number of infections in minority communities and among women, we need to redouble our efforts to fight HIV/AIDS both in our own backyard and around the world.