ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature and political consequences of representing HIV/AIDS. It focuses on how different methods of photography embody different ways of understanding and dealing with HIV/AIDS in Africa, the continent where the disease has taken its greatest toll. Since the early 1980s, some 16.7 million Africans have died from AIDS-related illnesses. Africa is, of course, far too diverse a continent to be represented in homogeneous ways. The chapter also focuses on photographs because they play an important role in shaping private and public understandings of HIV/AIDS. The political dimensions of photographic representations become particularly acute when they enter the realm of mass media. The chapter distinguishes among three photographic methods of representing HIV/AIDS: naturalist, humanist, and pluralist. Each embodies different forms of representation through which the chapter gives meaning to political phenomena. The chapter reveals how different ideological assumptions generate different public understandings of and thus reactions to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
