Amid Progress, the Anguish of AIDS

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 14, 2008

AIDS has been with us long enough in its withering and devastating way to create a body of art, and Washington has had plenty of AIDS art exhibits over the past two decades. It's like the plague. Domenico Gargiulo or Mattia Preti painting the outbreak in Naples, when half the city of 300,000 was killed in the summer of 1656. Gargiulo's view of the Piazza Mercatello: tumult, half-naked bodies, a bonfire in the distance, coffins, open mouths, dissolution, corpses. It is the garish slices of red in the foreground that you remember, though, on men's shirts, their pants, perhaps blood.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art has a new photographic take on AIDS, this time taking the worldwide view. There is little or no red here and nothing garish, although there is still plenty of death. It is an exhibit of The Gaze.

The idea almost sounds like a brochure: The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria last year hired eight photographers from the estimable Magnum Photos agency to document the life-changing effects of the anti-retroviral medications the agency is delivering, free, to impoverished AIDS-affected populations around the world.

Called "Access to Life" and opening today, the show is curated by Bill Horrigan, director of media arts at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. It includes more than a hundred photographs -- with videos and writing on the walls -- and the photographers include the great Gilles Peress, Steve McCurry and Paolo Pellegrin.

It's an exhibit that the Global Fund wants to be inspiring. The feeling that lingers, though, is sorrow and heartbreak.

Here is the Russian Dmitry Smirnov, in the painterly prints of Alex Majoli. Round the corner in this three-room installation and he's looking directly at you. He's propped up on a pillow, a worn, collarless shirt or gown across his shoulders, strands of his receding hair hanging thin, sweaty, askew. Lips not even pursed, just there, eyes holding neither terror nor relief, just instinct. The left half of his face almost completely in shadow. There is a pallor of dank rooms, rattling pipes, the smell of cabbage from the apartment's hallway.

He was dead weeks later; the picture of his snow-covered grave is just to the right.

Turn to the left in this room, the skin colors go from white to black, and you are in Mali with Pellegrin. The dominating face is at the top, Fatoumata Moro. Written information tells us she is 26, one of several wives in a polygamous marriage, and she never came back to the AIDS clinic after she tested positive.

She regards you straight-on as well, her face taking up almost the entire print. A hint of strong cheekbone, her hair bound in a wrap, the lips full, brought together, the eyebrows at rest. There is no expression, none at all, save for the eyes: full, lovely, lost, brown going to black. She is still in the stage of existence where life is supposed to give you things, before it starts taking them away, and yet she already looks gone, a million miles away.

Here is Haiti's Marie Sonie St. Louis, shyly turning away from the camera of Jonas Bendiksen, the hint of dimples at the corners of her mouth, the spaghetti-strap of her blouse countering the filled-out arms and shoulders of a patient who sees life returning.

A room over, there is Peress, shooting in Rwanda, all in black-and-white. Big rectangular prints, dusty roads and scalps, mud huts, the hills in the distance. The prints have the weight and gravity of the work in James Nachtwey's "Inferno," or maybe Don McCullin's "Sleeping With Ghosts," that sense of the world as a weight pulling on your shoulders, the sheer effort required to stay alive.

There are nine countries included: India, South Africa, Peru, Haiti, Swaziland, Vietnam, as well as those mentioned above.

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.