Worth seeing: Bloodline

Florence Alfonso by Kristen Ashburn

 

Documentary photographer Kristen Ashburn came to Atlanta last week to present her series of pictures on AIDS and family in Africa at the Atlanta Photography Group gallery. I had previously seen her multimedia piece on MediaStorm ( if you don’t know this website, check it out. It is one of the most interesting photojournalism site out there) but I found her explanations on how and why she did this work profoundly interesting and eventually it added up to the intensity of an already moving subject.  

For one thing, she did this piece of photojournalism on self-assignment, going for no more than three weeks at the time to several African countries, leaving on a mango diet for the most part. At the core of her drive was the desire “to make sense of statistics” and to understand what was happening to a devastated Africa afflicted by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. 

She followed humanitarian organizations on the ground, because, she said, it was the ony way to get close. She captured the faces of many families in black and white mostly, with a Rollei and many, many rolls of film. Interestingly, she found the use of this type of camera (where you look down into the viewfinder instead of shooting in the face of people) to have allowed more intimacy in her portraiture. Ashburn framed and edited her work in a meaningful way, not limiting herself to one condition but trying to encompasse all aspects of the devastation of AIDS, from the poor, the rich, the child, the elderly to the caretakers.

The exhibit is in view until March 6th.