This story was told to me by a young woman with HIV in Ukraine who was talking about why she felt it necessary to stand up publicly and talk about HIV, being HIV positive and the needs of people living with HIV. It was 1999 and, having worked in Eastern Europe occasionally since 1996 then full-time from January 1998, I had not yet met anyone who talked like this. As she spoke of her early experiences in HIV advocacy*/ talking to newspaper journalists, going to see the mayor of her city, considering going on TV to try to focus attention on the discrimination and stigma suffered by people living with HIV*/I felt I was in the presence of a powerful force which could perhaps do what had not been achieved by several years of high-level talks at the UN and Ukrainian government level. A force that could push Ukrainian society to look at HIV and AIDS, really look at the disease and the people living with the disease, and take action. It was almost 2 years earlier, in 1997, that I first saw John Ranard’s photographs. At first glance, I thought they were good: clear, sharp images that reflected the Russia and Ukraine I had seen. Desolate buildings. Drug users looking pale and interesting. Litter and debris on desolate streets. Fields of long grass reclaiming abandoned factories and half-built cultural centres. Bare-walled, drab hospital wards. After a longer examination*/I asked to borrow a portfolio over night*/I found something else. That same sense of a force that could help people to see HIV and its effects, that showed drug users (with or without HIV) as human. This personal account describes how I used John Ranard’s photographs (some of which are reproduced in this issue) in various training activities in Russia as well as reflects on the use of photographs in HIV prevention training more generally. In 1998, I worked as a consultant with what was then a programme of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)*/ Holland (now run by AIDS Foundation East West) to train Russian professionals in HIV prevention among injecting drug users (IDUs) (Burrows, Trautmann, Bijl and Sarankov, 1999a; Burrows et al., 2000; Burrows et al., 2000). The training comprised a 11-day initial programme held each 3 months (beginning in January 1998), and focused on harm reduction and rapid assessment and response methods, and included the use of the Rapid Assessment and Response Guide on Injecting Drug Use (Stimson, Fitch and Rhodes, 1998). Participants, usually three from each city, were encouraged to carry out a rapid situation assessment in their home cities before returning to Moscow, armed with the assessment results, to participate in a further 5-day training programme focused on the design of effective interventions. The programme was run eight times, finishing in February 2000. A total of 199 participants attended from 61 cities in 52 regions of the Russian Federation, carrying out a total of 61 rapid situation assessments. From these and subsequent funding proposals, 35 needle and syringe exchange projects (NSEPs) were started by participants of the training by mid 2000. During the initial training course, especially the early ones in early 1998, there was enormous resistance among participants to the concept of starting NSEPs E-mail address: dbsyd@aol.com (D. Burrows). International Journal of Drug Policy 13 (2002) 393 /395