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Two exhibits examine real-life suffering, recovery

PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 17, 2012|By Mark Feeney

Dominic Chavezs untitled photograph of girls in a slum in Sierra Leone,…

Romantic poetry has few lines more famous than the conclusion to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn’’: “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’’ Keats wrote his poem in 1819, 20 years before the invention of photography. Would that invention have made him wonder if truth and beauty were opposed?

It’s not the intent of “Global Health in Focus,’’ which runs at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University through March 24, to call into question Keats’s assumption. The show’s stated goal is quite otherwise. “Global Health in Focus,’’ a wall label says, “aims to educate the New England community about . . . critical global health issues, utilizing photography to offer direct insight into the individuals and communities involved.’’

But does the very considerable beauty of these pictures - Kristen Ashburn’s 13 black-and-white images of HIV/AIDS sufferers in southern Africa; Dominic Chavez’s color photographs relating to issues of water potability in Haiti and Africa; and David Rochkind’s 17 color photographs concerning tuberculosis in India, South Africa, and Moldova - work against communicating the no less considerable urgency and pathos of their subject matter? The beauty of these images arrests the eye, but that same beauty can perhaps lessen the impact of the truths shown about suffering and illness.

As their artist statements make plain, the last thing Ashburn, Chavez (a former Boston Globe staff photographer), and Rochkind want to do is aestheticize the people and problems they photograph. These are photojournalists committed to using their talents to better the world.

Yet the extraordinarily rich detail Chavez manages to convey of a dump in Sierra Leone makes the image no less transfixing for all the ghastliness of the setting. Rochkind uses color with such vividness and balance in a picture of a group of South African gold miners praying for safety that the eye can’t help but reduce them to secondary visual elements within the frame. The elegance and grave handsomeness of Ashburn’s pictures in no way mask the humanitarian and policy truths she wants to show. Inevitably, though, those truths seem less immediate. Part of the allure of beauty is in how it distances.