VisualAIDS

Announcing AIDSVideos.org

ANNOUNCING the launch of a new not-for-profit web site:

AIDSVideos.org
http://www.AIDSvideos.org

Their mission is to prevent the spread of HIV and to assist those affected by making the world's HIV/AIDS educational videos in all languages available online for free:

We are busy creating a free basic HIV/AIDS video curriculum in English. On
the web site, you can already see:
- Introduction to HIV and AIDS: What You Need to Know (17 min.)
- Top Ten Myths About HIV/AIDS (9 min.)
- Crystal Methamphetamine and HIV: The Connection (7 min.)

We will finish out the basic curriculum by adding "Prevention for Positives" in August (a video about how to live safely and healthily if you are HIV positive) and "How to Sterilize a Used Needle or Syringe Using Bleach." All of these scripts have been reviewed and approved for scientific and medical accuracy by Becky Kuhn, M.D., an AIDS clinician.

For our next phase, we plan to find medical students and residents who can translate the scripts into their native languages and deliver them into the camera, enabling us to make this free doctor-approved curriculum available in every language in the world.

We also have received the rights to videos from World Vision, Population Services International, hiv.bg, and hiv.is, and we have created additional original videos so far in Japanese, Swahili, and Afrikaans. We have uploaded
most of our videos to Google Video, Yahoo Video, YouTube, and the Open Media Network to make them as broadly available as possible.
[read more...]

Visual AIDS: December Web Gallery

"Self Portrait: HIV Glamour Puss," 1992
Luna Luis Ortiz
silver gelatin print, 16" x 20"

VISUAL AIDS AND THE BODY ANNOUNCE NEW WEB EXHIBITION

The Damaged Narcissist
curated by Richard Sawdon Smith

DECEMBER 2005
VISUAL AIDS WEB GALLERY 

Every month, Visual AIDS invites guest curators, drawn from both the arts and AIDS communities, to select several works from the Frank Moore Archive Project. Launched on December 1, World AIDS Day, Richard Sawdon Smith curated the current on-line exhibition which features the artwork of Archive Members; Robert Blanchon, John Dugdale, Frank Green, Max Greenberg, Rebecca Guberman, Sunil Gupta, Derek Jackson, Luna Luis Ortiz, Tara Popick, Eric Rhein, Nelson Edwin Rodriguez, Richard Sawdon Smith, Kurt Weston and Albert Winn

from the Curator’s Statement :

The purpose of searching through the archives was to find self-portraits that spoke to me about life as an HIV-positive person and how people had visualized their "newfound" body. In the end not all the images selected are self-portraits, but I felt the few exceptions still reflect my interest in how our identity and subjectivity may become altered, even reinforced by a diagnosis of ill health. As a photographer I was naturally drawn to this exhibition being about photography, but also because of the relationship that the photograph, as a reflection like the pool that Narcissus was drawn to, has with our concept of self, the image we carry in our mind's eye of who we are. Photography is not a pure reflection. It is not unmediated. It provides us with a version of the world, like that of Jacques Lacan's mirror stage analysis -- an infant's mis-recognition of itself in reflection as a whole body while its experience of the world is in a fragmented state, life lived through representation.

The British photographer Richard Sawdon Smith is Director of Studies at University College for the Creative Arts (UCA), Farnham, England, Co-editor of the forthcoming AIDS Cultures e-Journal, and a member of the Visual AIDS Archive Project. He is currently researching an article on the effect of ill health on self-image and subjectivity. His photographs and writing are published in a number of books including; Cultures of Exile (2004) Wendy Everett (ed); Art & Photography (2004) David Campany; Male Bodies: A Photographic History of the Nude (2004) & Fully Exposed: The Male Nude in Photography (1990) both by Emmanuel Cooper; Vile Bodies: Photography and the Crisis of Looking (1998) Chris Townsend and Representations of HIV and AIDS: Visibility Blue/s (2000) Gabriele Griffin. His work has been exhibited internationally including Galerie Godante, Japan; Belem Cultural Centre, Portugal; La Calcografia Nacional, Spain; MACBA (2002), and The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Scotland.  Richard Sawdon Smith's image is also featured in Visual AIDS new World AIDS Day e-cards.