Aids in Odisea

A penetrating piece of photojournalism by Andrea Diefenbach on the underestimated AIDS epidemic in the Ukraine: “the tragedy next door.” (DIE ZEIT)

Odessa, a harbor city in southern Ukraine, has been described as the pearl of the Black Sea. Ukraine is one of the countries that has been most severely affected by the collapse of the Soviet Union. One symptom of this collapse is the AIDS epidemic. The World Health Organization estimates that 160 thousand people in Odessa are infected with HIV. Ukraine has recently become the country with the highest rate of new infections in Europe, a sorry record, and in an international context, it is one of the countries in which AIDS is spreading most rapidly.

Andrea Diefenbach (*1974 in Wiesbaden) kept company with a few HIV-positive women and men in Odessa in the early months of 2006. Her quiet, emphatic photo series documents the acute AIDS epidemic there, the scale of which is virtually unknown in the West.