PORTLAND, Maine — This is not a sad show, though the topic is grave.
While the world is fixated on the Ebola virus, another health crisis — HIV/AIDS — is far from over. As World AIDS Day approaches on Dec. 1, the Salt Institute For Documentary Studies has mounted an exhibit to help the public better understand this disease through the plight of Mainers, your friends and neighbors, who are coping with the affliction that is treatable, but not curable.
On view now in the Congress Street gallery “Seeing ME: Profiles of Resilience,” showcases 25 people, from AIDS activists to suffering bystanders to children who grew up in the long shadow of the 1980s epidemic, in a profound way.
The subjects were selected by the Frannie Peabody Center, a Portland-based organization that assists people living with AIDS and HIV, to shed light on the devastation. “We tried to get a lot of different perspectives, a lot of different viewpoints,” the center’s director of development Katie Rutherford said. “It’s important to keep the conversation going.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1.1 million people in the United States are living with the HIV infection. Since the epidemic began in 1981, approximately 636,000 people in the United States with an AIDS diagnosis have died.
Smith Galtney, a Salt Institute graduate and photographer from Raymond, Maine, was tasked with capturing those in Maine touched by the joint scourge to refocus the public’s attention to the spirit of suffers among us while easing the stereotypes.
“I wanted to capture something that was very mundane,” said Galtney, who met people in their homes, at the mall and even McDonalds with camera in hand. “I didn’t want to put the person on a pedestal or under a microscope.”
Each portrait, like that of a smiling yet slightly haunted woman named Crystal Fawn comes with a short story. The self-described “AIDS orphan,” lost both her parents to AIDS. Her mother died when she was just 17 years old. He captures her with her two young children and husband looking pleased and proud. Fawn’s eyes flash a hint of worry.
A portrait of a man named Bernard, who lives in Gorham with his lover who is suffering from AIDS, is Galtney’s favorite. Instead of shooting the couple taking a nap together in bed, he shows Bernard in his living room surrounded by personal artifacts. A brilliant autumn day blazes through bay windows in the backdrop. “His lover was not up to be photographed the day I came because he was too sick,” said Galtney, who shot Bernard on his couch surrounded by the trappings of a comfortable life.
“This one is heartbreaking because you can tell it is a home and what’s at stake here,” he said. “There are certain homes that you go into where you can feel the life that has gone on.”
Documenting life is messy work, but that is what Salt excels at.
For the second year now the documentary school has partner with the AIDS/HIV service center to “take a deeper look and make it [the disease] really meaningful,” Donna Galluzzo, executive director of the Salt Institute, said. “There is a connection to it. In the images you confront yourself.”
And men like Rev. Charles Grindle, a director of music in a Kennebunk church who has lived with the disease for 26 years shows that not all diagnoses are a death sentence. In the exhibit he looks hale and hearty playing the piano at The Front Porch in Ogunquit.
Seeing ME seeks to address the stigma that the disease attacks only gay men and Africans and “remind people that this is still a global issue,” Rutherford said. “People don’t realize it’s still around. It’s difficult to engage people in that conversation.”
Surveying his photographs last week, Galtney, who is gay and grew up with the fear of AIDS hanging over him, thinks the show is almost upbeat. “I am proud,” he said. “This is not your average AIDS/HIV message.”
Galluzzo adds that “we may have moved from the dark days. But this show parallels the glimpses of the past and shows where we are now.”
Seeing ME runs through Dec. 5th. Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, 561 Congress St., Portland.
