A Broken Landscape

Gideon Mendel: "I first began documenting HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s. At the time, three quarters of the world’s 36 million people living with HIV/AIDS were in Africa. It was a slow burning tragedy on a monumental scale; one that was quietly decimating some of the poorest nations on Earth.

While awareness about the disease was growing rapidly at the time, antiretroviral treatment (ART) was still very difficult to access for many of the continent’s poorest. As a result, the disease was having an unimaginably destructive impact on communities across the sub-continent.

With support from the W. Eugene Smith grant in humanistic photography, I began to develop what has now become a lifelong area of work for me.

What seemed most important was to bring the human face of this disease to the fore. To do so, I tried to get as close as possible to the people and communities I was documenting. The images are all shot in black and white as this felt more emotional and compassionate in a context where there was so much fear and stigma. They also reflect the darkness of this time.

Today, twenty years on, a great number of people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa are able to access medication. However, many still face conditions similar to those documented here."

Source: https://gideonmendel.com/a-bro...