The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying. Thus postcolonial Africa exists in the consciousness of the general public in the rich world … mainly as a succession of unforgettable photographs of large-eyed victims … [including] of whole families of indigent villagers dying of AIDS. These sights carry a double message. They show a suffering that is outrageous, unjust, and should be repaired. They confirm that this is the sort of thing that happens in that place. The ubiquity of those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward – that is, poor – parts of the world (Sontag, 2003: 63–64; emphasis added).
The photographs chosen for presentation here are largely from highly acclaimed photographers whose explicit motivation is always to provoke awareness and empathy. Shock is used to promote a realisation of the severity of the epidemic. Outwardly, then, they aim to portray the first side of Sontag’s ‘double message’, showing the outrageousness of suffering. They have achieved fame (and publication), however, in the developed world, and cannot escape its obverse: as Sontag says, they potentially ‘confirm that this is the sort of thing that happens in … the benighted or backward – that is, poor – parts of the world’. The majority of photographs depicting AIDS in Africa fall into two broad categories, either portraying graphic images of suffering, often of emaciated bodies; or showing people’s pride and defiance in response to the epidemic. In both categories, there are many faces, whether sick and hopeless; sad and mournful; or joyful, loving or defiant in the face of prejudice.
However, the more I examined the photographs, the more I noticed how consistently mothers were portrayed differently to ‘people’ and how infection seemed to be written differently in the presentation of their bodies. Although the focus of this study is not on the analysis of media images, I have found it useful to consider these photographs, because of their powerful portrayal of the HIV-positive mother in the public imagination. Interpretations offered for each photograph are partial, focusing on what the photograph may tell us about constructions of HIV-positive motherhood, but there is no claim of an ‘authoritative’ interpretation, and the reader is invited to reinterpret them according to his/her own understanding.
It is not entirely true that ‘harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand’ (Sontag, 2003: 80). These photographs can therefore problematise the way in which HIV-positive motherhood is constructed. Whether intended by the photographer or not, the ways in which the ‘HIV-positive mother’ is portrayed, and the fact that she is often portrayed differently, bring some kind of understanding of the anxieties that this figure evokes and the social discourses in which she is located.
For example, Gideon Mendel’s photo essay on AIDS in South Africa (Mendel, 2002), published in The Guardian, aims to portray the human faces and stories behind the appalling statistics. Like many other AIDS photographers, Mendel captures the tragedy of AIDS, but he also explicitly aims to convey the multiple faces of the pandemic, including those of hope, courage and laughter, and of the tenacity of those speaking out in his photographs against the prejudice associated with the pandemic. He presents photographs of a variety of people in different situations. When visiting his website, one sees among these a photograph (photograph 1) of three women, one holding her baby, and reads the caption: ‘Why can’t they give us the treatment to make the mother healthy because who is going to look after that negative child if we are gone?’
By clicking on the photograph, the viewer enters the antenatal clinic where these women are sitting (photograph 2).
When viewed in its context, the photograph is no longer about HIV-positive mothers defiantly speaking out. On the contrary, amid the many faces and voices in the essay, the mothers, hiding behind their hospital files, are silent and hidden. Their facelessness is noticeable, evoking the shame of being HIV-positive mothers. This shame is counterposed against the familiar slogan, ‘Be wise condomize’, on the wall, which advice, the composition implies, these women clearly did not follow, their pregnant bodies proof of their irresponsible sexuality.
The mother in photograph 3, from Mendel’s collection, is also hidden, this time behind a hot-water bottle. The focal point of the photograph is her thin and presumably HIV-positive child. The foregrounding of the child’s thin body leads one to imagine both shame and guilt: the mother is responsible for her child’s infection. She is sad and ashamed, but she is also damaging or destructive. Attention is detracted away from the reflection in the mirror. Even at the margins of the photograph, even in reflection, the mother’s face cannot see and cannot be seen.
James Nachtwey (2001), whose photo essay in Time provoked debate about its graphic depictions of the horror of AIDS and its inclusion of emaciated bodies, includes a group of photographs united by the theme of motherhood and childhood. The mother’s body is not at all emaciated: it is not present at all. Instead, the mother is represented in her absence, either replaced by images of caretakers holding children or by images of abandoned orphans or street children living in abject circumstances as a result, it is implied, of maternal HIV. It seems that motherhood is shocking enough without the need for emaciated maternal bodies – there are very few such images to be found across the collections. Two photographs from Nachtwey’s collection indicate her threat.
In the first (photograph 4), grandmother and grandchild gaze unhappily into the distance. We are told that both have AIDS. The photograph comments on the coexistence of AIDS independently contracted within families, portraying the pathos of grandmother and child, who obviously contracted HIV from different sources. The absence of the mother (the viewer is likely to imagine that she is dead, since the grandmother is caring for her child) directs sympathy towards the child and leaves the mother only insinuated as the source of infection. The mother is present in the form of her opposite: the Virgin Mary tending to the baby Jesus in the picture on the wall exemplifies the pinnacle of motherhood. The photograph presents us with categories of innocence: the child, the caring grandmother and the good mother who is an asexual virgin. The photograph is typically silent on the father, the other partner in infection. He is present only in the form of Joseph in the picture on the wall, possibly the most ineffectual father in history; the father figure, but not the real father.
The actual mother is present in the next photograph (photograph 5) as a person rather than as a representation. The caption reads: ‘A mother of several children (left) was afflicted by AIDS and had to be taken care of by one of her daughters, who consequently could no longer attend school.’ The photograph confronts us with the tragedy of AIDS-related illness. Set in a domestic scene, it brings us closer to the struggles of everyday life. It also tells us a story about mothers and children: we are told that the mother has ‘several children’, and that the young woman in the photograph is one of those children. Here the threat is not only of infection, but of reproductivity, implied in the caption as irresponsibly endless. This procreative threat, it is implied, is also destructive, not only to the mother herself, but also to her daughter, who has been obliged to give up her