 "Photo: Amanda Beland")
In 1993, Robin had graduated as an adult college student with honors and married her current husband.
A year later, she was diagnosed with AIDS. Just after a series of lifetime accomplishments, she found herself dealing with one of the biggest struggles of her life.
Robin is one of 40 Americans portrayed in “Focus on Living: Portraits of Americans living with HIV and AIDS”, a national traveling photo exhibit that stops today at UNH for the first time since its inception.
The photo exhibit consists of 15 – 20 black and white portraits of individuals, as well as excerpts from those individuals, featured in the book, “Focus on Living: Portraits of Americans living with HIV and AIDS”, by author Roslyn Banish.
“But having this disease makes me feel very isolated,” said Robin in a quote from the book printed underneath her picture. “Most people would never suspect someone like me to be HIV positive because I don’t fit the image people have in their minds… I want to be recognized for who I am. I think people need to see the other faces of AIDS.”
According to the preface of the book, Banish set out to find people living with HIV after attending a workshop at her children’s high school, which featured a panel of four young people living with AIDS.
Banish didn’t have a specific image of the people she wanted to chronicle in mind when she started the project, though according to the introduction, she wanted the group to be diverse in order to show that the disease didn’t pick certain ethnicities or genders.
“My aim was to include as diverse a group of individuals as possible,” Banish said in the introduction to the book. “People of different sexual orientations, different ages, and from many ethnic and economic backgrounds. As one woman told me, ‘This is the ultimate nondiscriminatory virus. It doesn’t care what color your skin is, it doesn’t care how much money your mommy makes, where you live, how old you are.’”
The exhibit was brought to UNH through a dual partnership between the Kiddler Fund and the Office of Health Education and Promotion. The Kiddler Fund is a fund that was established by a past, HIV positive, Associate Dean of Students, Bill Kiddler, to sponsor student scholarships and educational & AIDS awareness programs.
Peter Welch, a health educator through Health Services, helped book the exhibit last December.
“I thought is was a beautiful representation of people living with HIV,” said Welch.
Welch said he pushed for the exhibit to makes its presence in order to help remind students that they aren’t invincible when it comes to these diseases. He noted the higher risk for sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, in college-aged students.
“College students are vulnerable to lots of sexually transmitted diseases, but the danger is that they think they aren’t,” said Welch. “I think it’s [the exhibit] another way to humanize the epidemic, and bring it a little closer to home.”
The exhibit will be on display today in the MUB Strafford Room from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The exhibit is free and open to the UNH community.
Follow Amanda Beland on Twitter at Twitter.com/TNHdiversity
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