Amid Progress, the Anguish of AIDS

The installations here are varied, and were designed by the photographers themselves. Peress's work is classic, flat, just there. Majoli works his Russian prints into the feel and look of paintings. The black in the room above the nude Alexey Smirnov (no relation to Dmitry) is utterly black, almost not found in nature.

Bendiksen went to a province in central Haiti. He shot pictures of five people who came into clinics and were put on the medication. Then he handed them Polaroids and asked them to have someone take their picture each day for three months or so. Autha Adolph survived and flourished, her pictures running in a straight line down a wall of the exhibit.

Just above her is the experience of Marie-Thérèse Nöel.

In the beginning picture, taken in December, she is posed, sitting upright in a brightly checked dress. Her daughter Manuela is leaned over in her lap, wearing a white sleeveless dress, lips pursed, eyes bright.

The following 29 Polaroids chart her mother's demise and death. "She can't say a word," the doctor has scribbled at the bottom of the last picture of her alive, on Jan. 17 of this year.

Then there are pictures of her coffin, funeral and burial slab in a sorry little dirt patch.

There are also two pictures of Manuela. She is now an orphan (there is no father around), clutching an aunt, her eyes now startled with fear. The last picture here is of her by a small creek, where the family has gone to do the wash.

Her dress is pink, her hair ribbons white. She is looking up to a sky that does not look back, her eyes vacant, confused, the gaze of a child learning that the world can be vast, cruel and devoid of mercy; of the awful comprehension that peace and shelter and love and health are things that exist in spite of the universe, not because of it.

Access to Life at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW. Through July 20. http://www.corcoran.org.