Photography by Damien Schumann

Exhibition dates: February 28 – March 31, 2011
Panel Discussion: March 2, 2011, 6:00 to 7:30 p.m., Bowl 2, Robertson Hall, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University
Gallery hours: Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment

Contact: Kate Somers, #609.497.2441

“Retrospect”, a powerful presentation of 52 large-format color photographs, integrates social documentary and art to explore how lives unfold for patients with tuberculosis in South Africa today. Combining photography and life stories, South African artist and documentary photographer, Damien Schumann, makes a case for the role of the arts in community activism and restores a human face to global health.

“After much time spent documenting tuberculosis, it became clear that there was a missing link between the patients and those helping them to get better,” Schumann says. Thus, Schumann transformed his photographic project into “an opportunity for people living with TB to voice themselves and express their understandings of TB, what is happening to them, how they and TB are perceived in society, and what they feel should be done to improve the state of TB.” Over a four-year period, Schumann produced an annual portrait of project participants, and the participants produced a hand written testimonial in their mother tongue to compliment each year’s photograph. Fostering community involvement, these photographs were then presented to the communities in which they were taken. For the first time, the full collection of photographs and texts in “Retrospect” will be on view in the Bernstein Gallery. Images from “Retrospect” may also be seen on Schumann’s website: http://dspgallery.com/portfolio/photo-essays/dialogues

In the Bernstein Annex Gallery, additional work by students in Princeton’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy and the Health Grand Challenges Initiative presents a people-centered approach to global health. Exploring the social dynamics of health – from diabetes in Belize to the relation of war trauma to poverty in Sierra Leone to AIDS advocacy and right to health litigation in Brazil – photographs, found objects, and collages are presented with ethnographic stories contextualizing student research. In their projects, students bring critical scrutiny to large-scale interventions and ask how they affect not only patients, but also their families, health workers, health systems and politics writ large.

A panel discussion in conjunction with “Retrospect” will be held at the Woodrow Wilson School from 6 to 7:30 p.m. on March 2, 2011, in Bowl 2, Robertson Hall. At 5:30, prior to the talks, refreshments will be served in the Galleries. Panelists: Damien Schumann, South African Artist and Documentary Photographer; João Moreira Salles, Documentary Filmmaker and Visiting Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities, Princeton University; Joseph Amon, Director of the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Moderator: João Biehl, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Program in Global Health and Health Policy, Princeton University.

Sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School and the Program in Global Health and Health Policy. Co-sponsored by the Center for Health and Wellbeing, the Department of Anthropology, and the Health Grand Challenges Initiative.