Looking at leprosy

How do you make images about a debilitating disease that keep the dignity, the complexity, and the feelings of the subjects intact?

How do you create images about this issue without further injuring those people who suffer from it?

In her photo essay for the Turkish Association for the Fight Against Leprosy, Delizia Flaccavento uses a direct, narrative, sometimes impersonal approach. She focuses on the symptoms and scars of leprosy.

I appreciate those photographs. They teach me something I want to know–what leprosy really looks like.

And they take two simultaneous risks: 1. that I will look away because I feel distressed. 2. that I won’t look away because I am interested—not in the people, but in the spectacle of the disease.

They also tell the story of an organization, rather than an individual.

Which, like cropping out or obscuring faces, can occasionally be a more sensitive way to represent a person.

Jan Sochor takes another approach in his photograph of a patient with leprosy in Haiti. He makes this person’s infected feet seem abstract and strange. They are barely recognizable.

This picture dissociates me from the personality connected to those feet. Similar to some of Flaccavento’s pictures, I don’t see a being here so much as I see a disease. The feet are gruesome. I feel revulsion and alarm. (Jan Sochor also has an essay about Haiti posted on PhotoPhilanthropy.org although this picture is from his blog.)

Ehrin Macksey does something very different again. His photographs of a leprosy colony in Vietnam–for Send Me/Kairos Coalition–depict the lives of the people in the village more than they depict the disease itself. In his images, the dock where a woman cleans her vegetables

or the monthly rations of meat each person receives

or the prayers said in a Buddhist temple

are points of entry for a visitor to this town. In his images I am aware of many lives, all intertwined. I’m aware of time: a past and a future. There is a disease in the village, but there are also people.

In spite of the harsh light, this photograph of a man named Bop feels tender. I find my mind lingering, holding onto it for a moment.

Each of these artists tells an important story. Each is searching for a way to gingerly illustrate an issue that can be hard to look at.