Karen Ande
“Face to Face: Children of the AIDS Crisis in Africa”
A joint project by award-winning journalist Ruthann Richter and documentary photographer Karen Ande, Face to Face: Children of the AIDS Crisis in Africa is a 128-page book that moves beyond hard statistics of the AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa to give the victims human faces through Ande’s beautiful photography and personal stories through Richter’s insightful prose.
Ande was first moved to photograph children with AIDS after a visit to an orphanage in Kenya in 2002. She was so affected by her experiences there and the children she met – many infected with the disease at birth, struggling to live without parents who’d already died – that she made multiple return trips in the years to follow, several times with Face to Face co-author Richter, an old friend and veteran journalist who had written about AIDS since the early days of the epidemic in the 1980s.
The book that developed from their experiences combines Ande’s candid portraits and sensitive views of the environments in which the children live with Richter’s accounts of individual children – some living in centers, some with the surviving members of their families – and also inspiring profiles of the activists who are working to improve living conditions for Africa’s infected populace.
Hanson Digital worked with Ande to prepare digital files for publication, creating high-quality drum scans from her original color slides, and color-correcting and optimizing the files for CMYK output. A number of exhibition-quality prints were made for a gallery show in 2008.
Face to Face is published by Hope Publishing House in Pasadena, CA, and is also available for sale through a special site for the book, Face to Face Africa, and on the artist’s Web site, Ande Photos, where you can find even more images from Ande’s African visits, including a gallery of “care-giving grannies,” grandmothers who are now raising the orphans of their own AIDS-affected children.
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Face to Face
Karen Ande