Statistics tell us that 3/4 of the world's 36 million people living with HIV/AIDS are in Africa, and that AIDS and poverty are frequently found in the same places. But Gideon Mendel, who has worked since 1993 in Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe on this "Broken Landscape" is more interested in people than numbers.

He presents each of his subjects - AIDS patients, nurses, medical assistants and volunteers from at-home help programs - through a sequence of beautiful black-and-white photographs and a personal testimony. While some patients are cared for in AIDS clinics, most cannot afford it. AIDS medication is almost never available. Patients mostly live at home and are cared for by family members: mothers, brothers, sisters, sometimes even grandmothers, who stretch their meager resources to support large numbers of people while worrying about what will happen to the next generation when they are gone.

Though the attentive reader of Mendel's book will feel the heartbreaking generalized sadness that comes from looking at beauty menaced, lives that are condemned to end too soon, the particular strength of the text and pictures is that neither fits into the cliché of photojournalism: showing a generic image of suffering. All of the people photographed have a name, and as we learn the details of their lives and daily struggles we relate to them almost as friends.

None of Mendel's subjects is resigned to his or her destiny. They all think of themselves as members of a community, one in which they can make a difference by educating others, by explaining that the epidemic is not a curse, by openly confronting the twin enemies of shame and silence. As the director of the Ngwelezane Hospital in South Africa states: "Those who accept an AIDS diagnosis, have a positive attitude and the strength to fight back, survive much longer than those who don't."

For more information or to order the book, contact: mail@actionaid.org.uk.

A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa
by Gideon Mendel
Network Photographers and actionaid
19.95 pounds

- Carole Naggar