Also In This Issue

Health Worker Migration: Disease or Symptom?

Greater than the Sum

In-Country Supply Chains

Leadership and Management

Health System’s Levers

The Road Not Taken

The Making of Anatomy of a Pandemic: A PBS Documentary

Kiev Diary: TB, AIDS and Junkies

Photos and story by Michael Wang

 

 

I have been graced. In my 20-year career as a photographer, the most satisfying work has come now with PATH. I believe in their mission to improve the health of people around the world. And when I document their projects, I am a step toward a solution I could never accomplish alone.

As I travel the world, it is my hope to do justice to the men, women and children I photograph. No matter how far from home I am, even in the harshest conditions in Latin America or Africa, I always feel a bond with the people I photograph – as if they were my own family. I’ve been able to see strangers with the eyes I use for relatives. But that wasn’t the case in Ukraine, at least not at first.

I was there to turn my camera to PATH's work on HIV and tuberculosis prevention and education. Ukraine has one of the fastest-growing AIDS epidemics in the world. More than half the HIV infections are caused by IV drug use. When HIV infection weakens the immune system, TB infection can activate and become TB disease. Without treatment these two infections are fatal.

These facts can be easily understood by a layman like me, but what do they mean? I was out of my depth. Here’s a story unlike any other I’ve photographed …a story not about the struggle of a family to find health care, or of a woman finding the strength in herself to fight against adversity, or of a poor baby struggling to stay alive for lack of a simple vaccine or clean water. I was to take photographs of injection-drug users.

Their story is hard to tell through images. There are no sympathetic faces of strong mothers and vulnerable, beautiful children. Instead there’s a junkie. A man, maybe in his late 20s – but I can’t tell because of the ravages of his drug use. I find him with the help of a Ukrainian NGO called Club N.A., who give support, counseling and clean needles to injection drug users in Kiev. He's one of three men living in the projects. These men are rough, urban and anything but inspiring at first glance. But as I speak to them (or communicate as best I can with the little Ukrainian I know) my guard begins to drop.

These junkies came to me with open eyes and open faces. In one of the moments of documenting them, I shot a picture that reversed my stereotype of them. This photo (man with needle) is here for you to see, for you to decide what constitutes a sympathetic person. Totally vulnerable to my lens, cascading a light that’s Rembrandt in its mirroring… at the decisive moment of the shutter’s click I know that as much as a baby in need of vaccine, this man is in need. This man, with his faults and his self-inflicted harm, is in need of help and he deserves aid as much as the strong woman who walked 5 miles across the Andes in Bolivia to get to a health clinic. He has as much right to health care as the mother of five in Kenya. That’s the realization I have when I click the shutter. I had to see him clearly as a human in need before I could show him to you that way.

The marginalized sufferers are easy to ignore and dismiss, whether it’s because we are casting moral judgments on their actions or because it’s just too hard for us to summon empathy. But they are the ground zero, they are the nexus of many epidemics and they need and deserve the kindest eye.

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Michael Wang is a project documentary photographer for PATH.