FEATURES
THE HIV/AIDS PANDEMIC IN AFRICA DEMANDS A NEW VOCABULARY OF ENGAGEMENT, PARTICULARLY FROM PHOTOGRAPHERS AND VISUAL ARTISTS CONCERNED WITH REPRESENTING ITS EFFECT. IN TRACING THE HISTORICAL TRAJECTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHER GIDEON MENDEL'S ACTIVIST WORK, MICHAEL GODBY ALSO HIGHLIGHTS THE CHANGING BACKDROP OF MAKING SOCIALLY-COMMITTED PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ERA OF HIV/AIDS
President Thabo Mbeki's intervention in the HIV/Aids crisis in South Africa, and the angry response of most Western commentators to his initiative, make it clear that, as well as being a humanitarian catastrophe, the pandemic is a fraught political issue. Although generally hidden by the media's attention to the scale and human experience of the disease, and strenuously denied by biomedical authorities, there remain important points of contention in the understanding of the nature of HIV/Aids. There is still dispute about the precise relationship between HIV and AIDS, the efficacy of treatment of the different HI viruses, the origin(s) of the disease, how transmission may relate to certain cultural practices and, perhaps most importantly, the question whether AIDS is indeed a single biological entity that can be controlled by specific medical treatment and changes in social behavior, or whether it is a complex socio-cultural phenomenon with biological manifestations.
Mbeki's challenge might be identified as an African view of the pandemic were it not for the fact that countries like Botswana are unequivocally committed to biomedical solution to the catastrophe. But his insistence that the alleviation of poverty is an essential part of any campaign against the disease, and his rejection of the "simple superimposition of Western experience on African reality,"[1] typify a widespread resistance to Western solutions being foisted on the continent. In this context the work of the documentary photographer is more than usually fraught. While the imbalance of power between photographer and subject is a problem for documentary photographers at any time, the photographer documenting the HIV/Aids pandemic in Africa is likely to be identified automatically with the power of Western cultural and economic interests.
Gideon Mendel, a photographer entirely committed to biomedical treatment(s) of the pandemic, has explored the potential of his medium to empower his African subjects in relation to the debates outlined above. Born in Johannesburg (1959), he started his career as a newspaper photographer in Johannesburg, documenting the political turmoil of the 1980s, later signing up with the international agencies of Agence-France Presse and Magnum. In 1987, suffering burn-out, Mendel withdrew from photographing situations of conflict, focusing instead on recording Yeoville, the rapidly-changing suburb where he lived in Johannesburg. In 1988, he extended his attempt to analyse the structure of South African society, documenting the several competing Great Trek commemorations. His exhibition Beloofde Land (1989) received mixed responses, although it has since been recognized as a significant moment in the deconstruction and disempowerment of the symbolic vocabulary of Afrikaner Nationalism. [2]
In 1990, Mendel moved to London and joined Network Photographers, who invited him to contribute an essay to the exhibition, Positive Lives, subsequently published in 1993. Stephen Mayes, managing editor of Network and co-editor of the collection, outlined the themes and issues of the project in his introductory essay as follows: "These photographs show how the whole of society is involved with HIV: its transmission, the provision of care, the support structures, the attitudes and (when the virus strikes closer to home) the emotions. A medical condition has become a social condition, and we are all required to form a response and to accept a responsibility – whether by action, thought, or by simply trying to understand."[3]
At first glance these comments would seem to apply to any documentary project on HIV/Aids but, on second thoughts, it soon becomes clear that they reflect the first world conditions in England, where the Positive Lives project originated. Although, as Mayes indicated, there was an amount of discrimination, particularly in homophobic circles, against people associated with the virus, the general level of tolerance and acceptance in England permitted an extraordinary intimacy in the representation of the disease. Indeed, the very ambition of the project to record emotional states and capture the reality of lived experience reflects a society that has both the will and capacity to care for all its citizens. The photographs themselves confirm the highly developed condition of medical and social care in that country.
In the same year Positive Lives was published, Mendel travelled to Zimbabwe and spent ten days photographing at the Matibi Mission Hospital. His photographs were published in The Independent newspaper's Saturday magazine supplement. Titled 'AIDS: A Challenge to African Health Care', his series includes a sequence of photographs taken at the bedside of a dying man. In interviews, Mendel always recalls his own anxiety but remembers also the command of the doctor in charge at the time: "Come on, man, do your job" [4]. The representation of such extreme suffering, as well as the conditions of poverty shown, constitute an entirely different image of AIDS than the one in Positive Lives. From such images it is clear that Africa cannot cope with the scale, the costs, and the social consequences of the pandemic. But these images of HIV/Aids also differ from standard Western representations in other ways. Unlike the Positive Lives project, which was published by English people, of English people, for English people, Mendel's Zimbabwean photographs were made by and for Western media, an arrangement that, in potentially silencing the subjects of the photograph, presents a formidable barrier to communities attempting to take responsibility for their own struggle against the disease.
In 1995, a colleague of Mendel suggested that the Iziko South African National Gallery (ISANG) bring the Positive Lives exhibition to Cape Town and add a South African component to the show. This arrangement, sponsored by the Terrence Higgins Trust, has become the model for the Positive Lives exhibition to travel the world. For the Cape Town show Mendel visited Hlabisa in KwaZulu-Natal, one of the worst hit areas of the country, and exhibited this new work alongside the original Network show. The following year he won the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography with a portfolio of his work in South Africa and Zimbabwe and a proposal to extend this work to Zambia and Tanzania; in 1998 he won first prize in the World Press Awards for his pictures from those four countries. Mendel has returned to South Africa and Zimbabwe several times since (more recently he has worked in Malawi, Uganda and Mozambique), sometimes piggybacking his AIDS work on other commissions.
In 1998 Mendel published the first version of A Broken Landscape: HIV and AIDS in Africa, as a supplement to the photography magazine, Reportage. In his introduction he writes: "These photographs show the human dimensions of the epidemic … Beside documenting the lives of families hit by the illness, they look at the work being done by many dedicated local people – some of whom have the disease – to combat the problem through education and care … Among the obstacles they face are lack of education, poor primary health care, the social dislocation caused by migrant labour and women's low position – all of which help to spread the disease."
In these words, Mendel draws attention to the means by which he sought to bridge the gap between himself as a Western photographer, with the power to represent his subjects in any way that he chooses, and his subjects, who have little control over the creation of their own image. Typically, photographers in Mendel's situation, impelled by a sense of urgency to communicate both the scale of the pandemic and the human cost, tend to create images of extreme suffering. Such images are, of course, rhetorical. They are designed to mobilise their viewers to take action to assist the subjects of the photographs. But, inevitably, these images are the views of outsiders, well-intentioned in their way, but aimed over the heads of their subjects. Such images, it has been argued, effectively confirm the disempowered status of their subjects by the assumption that they are incapable of taking any action on their own behalf. [5]
Mendel's approach in his first version of Broken Landscape was to go beyond documenting the lives of the families hit by the illness and record the work being done to combat the disease through education and care. "In Africa, as elsewhere, people with HIV and AIDS are starting to mobilize, to challenge prejudices and help their communities fight the virus," he notes in his text. Photographically this initiative is represented by extending the range of subject-matter from scenes of suffering to images of care-giving – by families, health-care specialists and communities – and to education for the prevention of infection. Such photographs subtly change the image of AIDS in Africa from one of hopeless suffering to one of responsibility and possibility.
In his acknowledgements, Mendel records that Population Services International (PSI) helped fund the booklet and that their affiliates in Africa gave logistical support; he also included a photograph of their work promoting the use of condoms in Johannesburg. The effect of this and other declared relationships with aid agencies is important beyond issues of funding and subject matter. Compared with a photojournalist, a photographer working with aid agencies will have direct access to both patients and aid networks on the ground; will spend considerably more time with these subjects; and can expect a more informed and discriminating readership. These considerations have a profound effect on the nature – and quality – of the images that are made.
This reciprocal relationship with aid agencies has continued into Mendel's larger project. Confusingly also called A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa (2001), this project was published by Network Photographers in association with ActionAid, a British-based organization directly involved in HIV/Aids projects in fifteen African and four Asian countries. The aim of the organization is "to promote absolute control" of the pandemic and "a sustainable quality of life for people living with HIV/Aids and affected communities". True to this spirit, Mendel's photographs are arranged in short essays that represent the patients and their families over a period of time, thereby showing the people involved in different situations and relationships that obviously suggest more complex identities
This concern with an evolving subjectivity, rather than the habitual representation of suffering, is extended first to the practice of naming his subjects, which is surprisingly unusual in documentary photography, and then to recording their individual narratives. In an attempt to represent the broader community with which ActionAid is concerned, Mendel has also recorded the images and statements of survivors (including parents and orphans), of health workers (both regular nurses and homecare workers), of AIDS educators, sex workers, AIDS support groups, and AIDS activists, amongst others.
Mendel's concerns here epitomise the differences between the genres of news and documentary photography. Where the former is concerned simply with recording an event, the latter may be understood to document the experience of people involved in the event. This understanding, that photographic subjects are complex identities that change in different situations and in different relationships, necessarily demands the sustained involvement of the photographer (both intellectually and emotionally) over a period of time; invariably too it demands a similar commitment on the part of the viewer.
Traditionally books have served well as vehicles to facilitate these intense viewing experiences, but increasingly photographers are making use of art galleries for this purpose. Mendel has pursued this option too, exhibiting both his two Positive Lives projects and A Broken Landscape in the contemplative space of art galleries. When Mendel proposed bringing A Broken Landscape to Cape Town in 2001, he intended it as part of a larger programme of events, arguing for his exhibition as an opportunity for using the museum as "an arena for a changing installation of photographs and other documentary material(s) that addresses what is going on in Cape Town in the fight against AIDS". He was referring here to initiatives such as the Cape Provincial Health Department's mass programme of preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV; also a trial programme of providing anti-retrovirals in the informal settlement of Khayelitsha, administered by Medecins sans Frontiers.
In his proposal Mendel spoke of the gallery as a "live documentary space", a venue "not only for displaying work, but also as a place where ideas and experiences are exchanged, with opportunities created for the participation of people living with HIV/Aids and in fighting the epidemic". He fulfilled this ambition when, during the term of his exhibition (December 2001 – April 2002), a group of women living with HIV/Aids visited the gallery. Drawn from the city's poorest communities, these women produced memory boxes, creations that functioned not only as a means of passing on memories about themselves and their lives to their children, but also as a springboard for engagement with the public, who worked with these women in producing solidarity boxes. In addition, the gallery space, which is immediately adjacent to Tuinhuis, the official residence of the State President, and close to the Houses of Parliament on Cape Town's Government Avenue, was used regularly as a platform for raising public consciousness about AIDS-related issues.
The exhibition took place at a particularly heated moment in the history of HIV/Aids activism in South Africa, when the Treatment Action Campaign, having forced major international drug companies to accept the use of generic equivalents in South Africa, then took the government to court to force it to provide anti-retrovirals on demand. The exhibition kept pace with these developments and activists, including Zackie Achmat, chairperson of the Treatment Action Campaign, and Judge Edwin Cameron, used the gallery space to both affirm their demands and show solidarity.
For his second set of images for the ISANG exhibition, Mendel brought forward an idea he had developed with an HIV/Aids advocacy group in Mozambique, of having people represent themselves within a frame of gaffer tape he made on the wall, either with their own image or, if for any reason they did not want their identity to be made public, then by filling the frame with any object they felt would speak for them. In this exercise, the photographer renounced most of the conventions of formal portraiture but provided a platform for his subjects to speak, both through some symbolic form in the image and, more directly, in the considerable space afforded to personal testimony. People living with AIDS, beneficiaries of the Khayelitsha anti-retroviral program, AIDS activists and others made use of this platform and expressed their concerns verbally in a variety of ways.
While some participants simply recounted their own stories, others spoke of the benefits of their treatment or directly attacked government policy on anti-retrovirals. Verbal testimony, in the form of narratives, was juxtaposed with letters – one panel took the form of a formal petition to the State President, signed by individuals in the photographs adjacent. As the project developed, Mendel released his subjects, as it were, from the gaffer tape frames and represented them in less constricted portrait formats. At the same time, he attempted to give more of their lives by capturing sequences of action on contact sheets that, like the portraits themselves, he scanned and printed on large format canvas screens. Some of these contact sheets also were accompanied by explanatory text.
Fundamentally, in these works and in a similar portrait essay he made in Lusikisiki last year, Mendel was attempting to change the balance of power that exists between a photographer and his or her subjects. While hinted at in A Broken Landscape, in his later work Mendel deliberately abandons the aesthetic criterion on which much of his career as a documentary photographer had been based. Images are printed digitally on canvas screens; control is relinquished to the subjects of his portraits; and text is prioritised over image. These are remarkable steps for a photographer, and yet, paradoxically, Mendel depended on the context of the gallery to introduce these changes.
In his newer work Mendel appears to be aspiring to the condition of installation art, an art form that depends not on the traditional aesthetic criteria of discreet visual forms, but on the communication of meaning through the interaction of form with specific systems of signification. In this sense Mendel's work can be compared with Sue Williamson's From the Inside (2002), a project that connects the gallery space with the outside world by having particular statements of people living with HIV/Aids written up as graffiti in public spaces and then reproduced as paired photographs in a gallery. But where artists such as Williamson depend on the gallery context to create a limited edition commodity, Mendel uses the gallery simply to promote the visibility of his cause and that of his sponsors, the Treatment Action Campaign and Medecins sans Frontiers, amongst others. For Mendel, it did not matter whether he sold any photographs from the ISANG exhibition because his livelihood depended not on sales but on future commissions that would be forthcoming if public consciousness was raised and political targets were achieved. In so doing he is able to use the contradictory criteria of art, that endorse simultaneously aesthetic and anti-aesthetic forms, to validate different aspects of his project.
It is a strategy that invites criticism. On the occasion of its exhibition in Johannesburg, Tim Trengrove-Jones condemned Mendel's photographs on the The Broken Landscape exhibition as "fatally invisible" (through the repetition of well-known imagery of suffering), "inappropriate" and "redundant" (because of the presence of textual testimonies), and as dead as the museum space in which they were displayed.[6]
It is, of course, appropriate for a critic to question the effect of exhibitions of documentary photography on popular consciousness, but it is short-sighted of Trengrove-Jones not to recognise that the images and the texts are in fact part of the same project, and that the photographer, in radically changing his methods of photography, was actively engaging with both his medium of representation and the institutional frameworks within which he is working.
By using taking his canvas screens out of the gallery context and using them in installations and the march against Parliament, for example, Mendel is actually transforming the institutional space of the gallery or museum from a repository of 'relics' to an active political platform. Updating the language of the Struggle, which emphasized a sense of urgency in the composition of the image, and distribution of the image through a selected range of media,[7] Mendel's AIDS work demonstrates a similarly partisan approach to co-opting institutions – of the media, new technologies, and even art – that affect, or even determine, one's ability to get the message out.
This is an edited version of a paper presented at the Language, Literature and the Discourse of HIV/Aids in Africa conference at the University of Botswana, 2002. The author wishes to thank Annabelle Wienand
[1] Thabo Mbeki, 'Remarks at the first meeting of the Presidential Advisory Panel on AIDS', May 6, 2000; Thabo Mbeki, 'Speech at the opening session of the Thirteenth International AIDS Conference', Durban, July 9, 2000
[2] Michael Godby, 'Dismantling the Symbolic Structure of Afrikaner Nationalism: Gideon Mendel's Beloofde Land Photographs (1989)', South African Historical Journal, Vol.39 (1998), pp.111-128
[3] Stephen Mayes, 'Photographing the Invisible – A Statement of Intent', in Positive Lives: Responses to HIV – A Photodocumentary, edited by Stephen Mayes and Lyndall Stein (London: Cassell, 1993)
[4] Quoted from Cape Times, May 29, 2002
[5] Martha Rosler, 'In, Around, and Afterthoughts: On Documentary Photography', in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, edited by R. Bolton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990)
[6] Tim Trengrove Jones, 'Simple Aids vision belongs in museum', Sunday Independent, June 16, 2002
[7] Paul Weinberg, 'Documentary Photography: Past, Present and Future', Staffrider Vol.9-4 (1991), pp.95-97Staffrider Vol.9-4 (1991), pp.95-97
Michael Godby
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