Educating Through Photography

Each woman’s story is different: Caroline didn’t want to tell her husband she was HIV positive. Pumla has three children who are HIV negative. Nolukholo hasn’t disclosed her HIV positive status to her family. An exhibit of photographs, taken by these and other South African women living with HIV, is giving the HGSE community the unique opportunity to experience the lives of these women — through the images they captured — as they struggle with both poverty and HIV.

The exhibit, “The House is Small but the Welcome is Big,” will be showing at Gutman Library until February 2. The project, organized by Neal Baer, Ed.M.’79, Venice Arts Co-Founder/Executive Director Lynn Warshafsky, and Creative Director Jim Hubbard, is a breakthrough in teaching and educating underprivileged people how to document their lives and struggles through the arts.

For Baer, an award-winning executive producer and writer of television shows Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, ER, and China Beach, his latest work on this project is particularly rewarding.

He got the idea for the photo project while traveling to India to speak about incorporating AIDS topics in TV shows. He figured that using cameras to document lives, particularly AIDS in Africa, would be a worthwhile project. He contacted the Venice Arts Organization after seeing some of Hubbard’s work and together they raised money to purchase the cameras and teach the women how to take photographs.

Baer, who, in addition to his degree from HGSE, earned his A.M. and M.D. from Harvard, views much of his work as a chance to educate. Although he isn’t directly working in a classroom, Baer believes the work he does educates in a different way. “There are a lot of different ways of communicating and that’s the basic level of educating,” he says. “There are a lot of ways to communicate about different issues and, through photography, you can use a medium that’s relatively inexpensive.”

Baer says that part of what makes this project interesting is that the exhibit allows the audience to learn about these women from their point of view. “This isn’t from our perspective,” he says. “You get very different pictures from people who are documenting their own lives in ways that they couldn’t before because they didn’t have access to cameras. So what resulted are pictures and stories about disclosing their HIV status and what that meant to them.”

The photography also gave the women a confidence about their lives and their importance. Two of the women attended photography school after the project wrapped.

In many ways, Baer credits his experiences at Harvard to leading him down this career path. While studying at HGSE, Baer began taking documentary film courses as a means to investigate sociology. After creating two films at Harvard, it catapulted his interest in filmmaking, ultimately leading him to Los Angeles where he enrolled in film school. Harvard also sparked Baer’s deep interest in social issues, especially since his research work focused on children of poverty. Over the years, he worked closely with Kennedy School Professor Mary Jo Bane and says that HGSE Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot influenced his style of writing.

“At 22, I had professors interested in me,” he says remarking on Bane’s offer to help him publish a research paper. “She said, ‘You have interesting ideas. Let us help you with that’ and it had a huge impact on me.”

Ultimately, Baer says he discovered television as a way he could “do it all” in the sense of combining education, sociology, and medicine.

The photography project has put everything into perspective for Baer. Besides showing the women’s work, the exhibit aims to raise money for the budding photographers. When Baer visited South Africa in August, he gave the commissions made from the images to the women. “One woman was able to buy a new roof and another could pay for a new school for her children,” he says. “They had never seen that much money ever, and we’re talking about $100.”

The work, which has been exhibited across the country at Colorado College, the University of Los Angeles, and the International AIDS Conference in Toronto, has made an impact on its audience too.

“People have been very moved by the [images,]” he says. “It’s stunning to see women who are mothers with HIV and trying to carry on with their lives. You don’t see it here and it is so tragically common there, but it doesn’t have to continue with their children.”

Baer plans to continue work similar to the “House” series with two more Africa-based projects next summer.

Due to his great success, Baer has been able to give back in ways both creative and educational, as demonstrated by the “House” exhibit. “I never dreamed I’d work in Hollywood, be a doctor, or be doing this project in Africa, but that’s the good thing about going to a place like Harvard because you can find out and try different things. I tried film and medicine and, obviously, it had a huge impact.”