Gideon Mendel bridges two worlds in his photo- essays on living with Aids. He spoke to HAZEL
HOW can an illness be photographed when its symptoms — until the final agonising stages — are largely invisible? How can the struggle of those afflicted with this disease be adequately documented without resorting to sensationalism or stereotype? These are some of the questions confronted by award-winning South African photographer Gideon Mendel in Positive Lives: Responses to HIV — an exhibition recording the impact of Aids on ordinary lives.
A member of the London-based Network group of photographers who curated the show, Mendel played a pivotal role in bringing it to this country. He is also the only South African photographer represented in an exhibition which — through a series of vignettes photographed in different contexts — reveals the impact of Aids on everyday lives.
Most visitors to the Johannesburg Art Gallery — attendance figures at this venue have been appalling, compared to Cape Town’s National Gallery, where the exhibition was first shown — will be familiar with the background to the show. But many are probably unaware of the challenges involved in documenting the pandemic: the process of establishing trusting, confidential relationships with subjects, and the imperative of subsuming the photographic ego beneath honest, non- judgmental documentation.
Although the term “documentary” carries with it the expectation of objectivity, the latter task is impossible to achieve, particularly when the subject is an illness shrouded in myth and fear. Yet, overall, the exhibition has succeeded in playing down the sentiment and focusing on the subject. And this is particularly the case with Mendel’s work, which links the experiences of two countries — England and South Africa — provoking a reassessment of the prejudices surrounding the big disease with a small name.
Both essays produced by Mendel — the first photographed in London hospital wards, the second taken in a predominantly rural context — serve as quiet monuments to the courage of those who allowed themselves to be made visible.
“I included the South African component in the exhibition as a bridge of sorts,” says Mendel, “because I wanted to form a thematic link between Aids in varying contexts. I felt it was important to articulate the different ways in which the disease affects different communities.
Mendel’s London narrative is pictorially more successful than his South African project — predictably, because it taps into the emotionally-charged aspects of the disease within a more contained, concentrated environment. Yet the photographs are far more than exercises in lump-in-throat documentation. They are testaments to intimate, loving and surprisingly comfortable (given Mendel’s presence) moments between Aids patients and their loved ones. But, as empathetic as these works are, as Mendel admits, they cannot depict the process involved in gaining the consent of families who have learned to acknowledge the disease but not the sexual preference of their children; nor the dilemma of families and lovers torn between the desire to preserve epitaphs to the dead and the need to erase
“In situations like this, you are not dealing simply with the wishes of the patient but of those who are left behind with their grief. They are often filled with conflicting motions, and the photographer is inevitably caught between respecting their privacy and the need to educate the public. In situations like this, the photographer cannot completely escape the role of intruder and voyeur.”
Mendel describes the South African project as “extremely tough — probably the most difficult photographic assignment I’ve ever undertaken — but incredibly fulfilling. It is definitely the beginning of an ongoing
Words like “access” and “education” pepper his recollections. “The need for both,” he explains, “has resulted in the transformation of Positive Lives into a mobile exhibition which will be taken to townships and rural communities around the country. By looking at these images and reading the stories of suffering and courage, hopefully people will be able to understand the disease in a new, demystified light.”
Mendel’s photographic trajectory took him through the South African hinterland, documenting workshops on Aids prevention attended by traditional healers and interacting with Aids fieldworkers who had transformed their affliction into an opportunty for educating their communities and eradicating the stigma of Aids.
Although a picture is supposed to paint a thousand words, or so the clich goes, an exhibition of this nature is inevitably dependent for clarity on written contextualisation. Although Mendel attempts, as far as possible, to let the photographs speak for themselves, the fact that they cannot do so without an accompanying text does not demean the potency of the images. For in their ordinariness and, in parts, seeming lack of specificity, they challenge the notion that Aids only touches certain faces.
Through the eyes of a baby who has never felt the touch of a naked hand, the actions of an HIV-positive fieldworker who preaches the gospel of the condom, and the expression of a domestic worker abandoned by her loved ones, Mendel effectively communicates the banality and ubiquitousness of an illness that is blind to colour, class or sexual preference — a disease that has imposed a death sentence through the most primal and life-affirming of all acts.
Positive Lives: Responses to HIV runs at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until February 11