The Vancouver Initiative for AIDS Innovation

As a teenager, I remember being terrified by a screaming Time magazine cover story. It was published on August 12, 1985 under the apocalyptic banner of AIDS: The Growing Threat.

During the same period, articles started appearing about an exploding epidemic of another kind in North America: homelessness. It seemed as if the world was dismantling. Or my youthful innocence was fraying.

Little did I know then that more than a decade later I would be working on projects that spanned these worlds of suffering.

In 1996, I started a long-term exploration of the interconnections between public health and poverty. I began my journey as a documentary photographer and researcher, and ended up working as a community organiser in Edmonton’s inner city. As I moved from a passive observer to a more active agent, the dynamics of power and powerlessness became apparent to me

I have grown to respect the fluid force of HIV/AIDS — the way in which the retrovirus continues to write and rewrite the stories of human struggle. I have often marvelled at the elemental nature of this disease.

In many ways, HIV has the same qualities as water. It follows the path of least resistance. If we prevent its flow in one direction, it moves elsewhere. It finds the weaknesses within our existing social worlds — the pinprick in the public health system, the fissures between ethnicity and class, the fault lines between privilege and prejudice, the growing gap between words and action. All of these vulnerabilities are exploited by its relentless pressure, by its infinite patience.

Intellectually, I understand this. But my heart still aches to reconcile the contradictions of a disease that is so well understood and preventable, and yet so utterly elusive and destructive.

I have mental images of homeless people I met who were wiped out by the disease, or by other AIDS-related illnesses such as tuberculosis. Some of these individuals are memorialised in my photographs. They still look at me with tender vulnerability.

At times, sadly, my strongest recollection of their presence is their absence. They reside in the shadow region of memory. They died much as they lived: at the edges of things, forgotten by the larger community.

They are a reminder that perhaps the most pervasive threat is not HIV/AIDS itself, but rather our intolerance, apathy, and inhumanity.

The words of Bertolt Brecht echo in my ears:

When we come to you
Our rags are torn off us
And you listen all over our naked body.
As to the cause of our illness
One glance at our rags would
Tell you more. It is the same cause that wears out
Our bodies and our clothes. The pain in our shoulder comes
You say, from the damp; and this is also the reason
For the stain on the wall of our flat.
So tell us:
Where does the damp come from?

© Pieter de Vos