Seeing for ourselves

 

HIV and AIDS in the community: Challenges and solutions

The photographs in this exhibition were all taken by teachers and community health workers in the Vulindlela district as part of the Learning Together project. The group, made up of 18 teachers from 3 secondary schools and 18 community health workers associated with the Mafakatini Clinic, came together to explore the ways in which they, in their particular groups and from particular vantage points, see the challenges regarding youth, HIV and AIDS, as well as possible solutions. They all took inexpensive 'point and shoot' cameras into their homes, schools and communities to photograph their world as they see it. They explored two pivotal questions: What are some of the key issues that affect young people? How are young people involved in solutions? The photographs in the collection, numbering more than 500, serve in their sepia expressiveness, as poignant narratives of race, gender, life and death: we see a bus waiting to pick up community members on their way to yet another funeral, AIDS Awareness Days in a school, a health care worker walking past a few cows and into the mountains every day to visit a patient, a group of white people sitting in the open space of the Clinic. We are shown an 18 year old boy who has just learned that he is HIV positive, and a young girl asking to be photographed on the day her father died, and so on. Using their photographs as entry points, the two groups engage in visual and spoken dialogue, and they comment on how their pictures are similar and how they are different:

"Teachers must work with whole groups of young people and they see them every day. As community health workers we mostly deal with individuals".

"Community health workers have more access to equipment and materials. They have transportation." "Teachers can speak and write better than we can."

"Dealing with death is what we all have in common" is an overall realization. "The loneliness and frustration" is another shared element of their work.

They use their photos to explore a common ground for how they might work together, and how they can use each other in an area that has few resources and huge needs.

Naydene de Lange, Claudia Mitchell, Relebohile Moletsane, Jean Stuart, Thabisile Buthelezi, Myra Taylor, Fikele Mazibuko, Kathleen Pithouse

Acknowledgements: We gratefully acknowledge the support of the RGO, UKZN; the NRF; the Gendering Adolescent and AIDS Prevention project, Social Sciences Research Council of Canada; and Dr. Robert Balfour, Durban School of Education. We also acknowledge our collaboration with the CAPRISA Project of the UKZN School of Medicine.

Centre for Visual Methodologies and Social Change, Durban School of Education, Edgewood Campus