Please permit me to go a bit off-topic to tell you about an important event taking place today.
Award-winning photojournalist James Nachtwey is premiering a slideshow on the disease XDR-TB that is the culmination of his wish to share an underreported worldwide story using news photography in the digital age. The story will be spread via an eight-page spread in TIME magazine, a gathering of global activists and leaders, and outdoor screenings around the world and across the Internet in an effort to raise awareness about the disease.
The slideshow is the subject of Nachtwey’s TED Prize wish. The TED Prize is awarded annually to three exceptional individuals who each receive $100,000 and granting of “One Wish to Change the World.” In raising awareness about XDR-TB, a virulent, mutated strain of traditional TB existent in 49 countries and responsible for more than 20,000 preventable deaths each year, Nachtwey comments, “Photographers go to the extreme edges of human experience to show people what’s going on. They aim their pictures at your best instincts: generosity, a sense of right and wrong, the ability and the willingness to identify with others, the refusal to accept the unacceptable.”
Nachtwey’s slideshow will be screened in public spaces in cities around the world, including New York, Paris, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Seoul, Hong Kong, and London, on all 7 continents and across the internet starting on October 3, and continuing throughout the month. Paul Simon (singer/songwriter), Larry Brilliant (Google.org), Joanne Carter (RESULTS), Winstone Zulu (survivor), and Marcos Espinal (World Health Organization) will all gather with Nachtwey in New York City for a special event this evening.
Joanne Carter, executive director of RESULTS USA, the medical advocacy group supporting the campaign, says, “We hope that the visibility achieved by the global unveiling of these photos will underscore the danger of underfunding and lack of global attention to TB programs, spur people around the world to demand action, and spur world leaders to act.”
Using haunting images in a digital slideshow, this multimedia campaign will raise awareness about XDR-TB and launch a social action campaign with partnering organizations RESULTS and Demos UK. The TED Prize (given annually at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California) made Nachtwey’s project possible, along with medical technology company BD, TIME magazine, the Streaming Museum, Phantom Galleries, and many other key partners.
To learn more, please visit xdrtb.org and prepare to be shocked and moved. To view Nachtwey’s TED talk on the subject, click here.
