In honor of this year’s World AIDS Day, I decided to reach out to some of the former Camp Heartland kids who were featured in the OSF Moving Walls 11 exhibition, or had been profiled in the book that I co-produced for the HIV/AIDS NGO‘s peer prevention outreach. It has been 15 years since I first began photographing and interviewing teens who were facing the continuing stigma surrounding HIV, and all these years later, given our new sharing culture and social media connectivity, it seemed time to follow up.

The series ran over at the Open Society Foundation’s Instagram feed this week, presenting updates on the young people’s lives, as well as their thoughts on growing up, secrecy and disclosure, friendship and loss, and surviving against the odds. To be continued.

View the rest of this entry »

Also for World AIDS Day, we were featured on Yahoo News with a selection of images and quotes from our Graying of AIDS oral history project.

Thrilled to get this nice recap out to audiences in September! Onward and upward with this project – and grateful for the succinct explanation of all the different things we’ve been busy with over the last couple of years! Here’s the on-line version.

This week saw the demise of Winnie’s Bar in Chinatown, and the usual NYC blogs have been abuzz with a call to arms to “Save New York” and strengthen small businesses; to halt encroaching gentrification across too many of our neighborhoods, as one by one local places with decades of history are replaced by yet another chain restaurant or bank or pharmacy. Like, how many more Seven Elevens and Duane Reades – or bubble tea emporiums or hip fusion restaurants – does this city need?

View the rest of this entry »

What a fantastic opportunity to talk about The Graying of AIDS project and our new collaboration with Walgreens!  Check out the clip here. And I hope you remember Ed Shaw from previous publications!

A selection of images from my ongoing coverage of this awesome group of Chinatown youths is up on the CBS News website as a slide show! Check it out here!

I am thrilled to share the latest adventure in The Graying of AIDS project’s ongoing saga: we just launched a new collaboration with Walgreens, a national pharmacy chain that has been committed to HIV treatment and testing over many years. This month saw the Miami debut of Well Beyond HIV, a traveling exhibition and campaign featuring personal narratives and portraits of people living and aging with HIV.

This promises to be a great opportunity to reach new audiences and draw attention to the aging of the epidemic, and we’re super excited to find out where this project is going to keep going. For now, next step: San Francisco!! Go team!!

View the rest of this entry »

Speaking of a new on-line presentation for our growing collection of stories…  while we are freshly inspired by our experiences at AIDS2014 and at Photograpy Expanded to seek additional funding to support future creative collaboration and development of a more intuitive, user-friendly web archive, for now we have migrated our site over to a more easily searchable and downloadable temporary home at www.agrayingpandemic.org. Bye-bye, tumblr. It was good while it lasted. Back to WordPress.

We launched this interim site on World AIDS Day and will continue to tweak and expand on content and functionalities in the coming year. There are still more portraits and interviews left to edit from Australia, and longer versions of many interviews will be added over time!

Here’s the Graying of AIDS team (i.e. Naomi Schegloff and myself) presenting at the Magnum Foundation’s Photography, Expanded Symposium at Parsons The New School for Design.

The symposium capped a year of workshops and presentations that tackled issues of documentary audience engagement in the digital realm. The Graying of AIDS was among four projects that were selected for the pilot of a PhotoEx project development initiative, during which artists were paired with design and communications experts for one-on-one meetings to implement a digital strategy for their work. View the rest of this entry »

Here’s a quick preview of our latest participatory Graying of AIDS installation at AIDS2015. But first and foremost, a HUGE Thank You!! to all of our backers and supporters during the whirlwind, last minute Indiegogo fundraiser that made it all possible.

As usual, we were much too busy producing new work and interacting with visitors to our installation site to do a thorough job of documenting our process. But here are some snapshots, and to sum it all up: going half way around the word to continue our global series on aging and HIV was worth it in every way imaginable, and we can’t wait to share some of the amazing new portraits and interviews.

View the rest of this entry »