Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on a photograph of a young man “before” and “after” treatment for AIDS, which has been made into a health education poster in Kenya. I explore the production, circulation and reception of this image, as it draws globalized discourses into new forms of self-fashioning.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on one photographic image, which has become iconic of the journey of AIDS patients in Kenya: the representation of a young man's diseased and decimated body "before" treatment with ART, and of the same man "after" treatment and the restoration of his body to health and life. With its strong "conversion" narrative, this image has been used as a key tool in AIDS education, to persuade people to get an HIV test and enroll into free treatment programs, which are funded by the US. Taken in Haiti, by medical anthropologist-activist Paul Farmer, of one of his patients, the photograph is considered by Kenyans to portray one of their own countrymen. Unlike earlier forms of health education in Kenya, the poster seeks to convert people to a scientific way of seeing disease not through a dissemination of scientific knowledge (of the HI virus, for example), but through a shocking image, visceral recognition and a direct appeal to the viewer's experience. I explore the production, circulation and reception of this image, its social history and its agency, as it enters into local conventions of display and draws globalized connections, discourses and practices as well as more intimate relations into new forms of self-fashioning. In being stretched across different scales, from the global to the national, and in being displayed in public as well as intimate, domestic spaces, this photographic object creates new relationships between these spaces and the actors that inhabit them.