The Diseased Body and the Global Subject: The Circulation and Consumption of an Iconic AIDS Photograph in East Africa

Abstract

This article focuses on a photographic image that has become iconic of the journey of AIDS patients in Kenya: the representation of a young man's emaciated body “before treatment” with antiretroviral therapy (ART), and another of the same man “after treatment” and the restoration of his health and life. Showing one of his patients in Haiti and taken by the medical anthropologist and activist Paul Farmer, the photograph traveled to Kenya where it was made into an AIDS-education poster and used as a key tool in ART programs. With its strong “conversion” narrative, the poster seeks to convert viewers to a biomedical way of seeing, and experiencing, disease and infection. I explore the production, circulation and reception of this image, its social history and its agency, as it entered into local moral economies concerning HIV, visibility and value, and drew globalized connections, discourses and practices into novel forms of self-fashioning. In being stretched across different scales, and in being displayed in public as well as domestic spaces, this photographic object creates new relationships between these spaces and the actors who inhabit them.