Background to new chapters: India and Bangladeshcz

AIDS has perhaps been the most misunderstood of diseases. The misinformation, the prejudices, the fears, the uncertainties that surround it, are testing a social fabric that has remained unquestioned for too long. For all the stigma and the isolation that HIV/AIDS has generated, it has also made us confront a set of issues that would otherwise have long lived in the closet. We are being forced to recognise our sexuality. To test our friendships. In close up and in focus, we are confronted with our ability, or lack of it, to cope with loss, with our ability to care, with our self-righteousness. We are relearning the power of love as a healing tool.

This body of work, through the curious association of Drik, an agency set up to challenge western viewpoints, and Network, a western agency prepared to question the west's own cultural notions, has brought together three photographers, known for their social commitment, who have provided personal interpretations of the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Together they tell some of the stories of those living with HIV in India and Bangladesh. The work shows doctors who are kind, those who are brutal and those prepared to take on the establishment in order to give hope. It shows men at ease with their sexuality in a world that still doesn't quite know how to cope. It shows ordinary individuals who are far from ordinary, in caring and giving roles that are part of their everyday lives. It shows sex workers who are warm human beings, making changes within their own communities. It shows individuals who are coping where nations have failed.

Positive Lives is a developing project with new work currently underway in Australia and chapters planned in South and Central America, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and South-East Asia.

Photographer's Statement :

"In the initial years of HIV in India, the only visible groups that could be "forcibly" tested and studied, were the sex workers, professional blood sellers, drug users and truck drivers. Journalists, such as myself also followed the trend, and we all created the AIDS stereotype that led to the stigma that still plagues HIV in India. So the myth is AIDS = drug-users/ sex with sex workers, generally the so - called "dregs of society". With such stigma, very few can be open about their status of their own free will. The disease is traumatic in itself, but the prejudice that accompanies it is perhaps even more so.

The government and many 'socially conscious' groups created more misconceptions, rather than awareness, with their negative campaigns. So we had messages like "AIDS is not caused by mosquito bites", and of course in time people forgot the NOT and just remembered the association. Because 'safe sex' campaigns were mainly aimed at sex workers, generally when men paid for sex, there was no question of them using condoms as condoms were already associated with family planning. So the women had no choice. Now we have a group of positive housewives, and homes for children of positive people. HIV has now become so prevalent that we are long past the point of just focusing on the high-risk groups that most NGO's and funders like to categorise so. Its time to refocus and move on.

For this project when I met with positive people, the general refrain was "Can you please photograph us with some Hope." A man who had been positive 10 years said " We do not die on becoming positive. We still eat, go to the cinema, watch the sunrise, fall in love, get married......Why do you media people make us die before our time? All you care about is HOW we became positive, why don't you ask how we live with HIV instead".

One of the key factors in HIV care in India will be home-care. There just are not enough hospital beds for the ill. Yet home-care means a certain openness and awareness within the community, and the family. But with the stigma of the stereotype, how does one tell ones father, one is positive?."

Dayanita Singh.
India