A Positive Life: Portraits of Women Living with HIV
December 5 – 28, 1996
A couple of years ago, I had a job interviewing mothers with HIV/AIDS and their children for psychological research studies. Unlike the general public, I have been privy to intimate and detailed accounts of their struggles and successes in coping with their illness. As a photographer, I have tried to represent these women in a way which might dispel stereotypes and shed light on their little-known experiences. The photographs (along with the interviews of their subjects by the writer and activist River Huston) have recently been published as a book titled “A Positive Life: Portraits of Women Living with HIV.”
Mary Berridge’s photographs have been exhibited in many venues including the Museum of Modern Art in NY, the De Young Museum in San Francisco and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She is interested in how people find meaning in challenging circumstances.
Her work has received several awards– among them are: a Guggenheim Fellowship, a NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Lange-Taylor Prize, and an Aaron Siskind Fellowship. She has published three books: A Positive Life: Portraits of Women Living with HIV (Running Press, 1997), On the Eve, Moscow, 1998, (Blue Sky Books, 2014) and Visible Spectrum: Portraits from the World of Autism, (Kehrer Verlag, 2021). Her photographs have been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including The NewYork Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Guardian, TIME, Der Spiegel, and CNN.
After earning her MFA from Yale and a BA from the University of Michigan, she went on to teach at Princeton University as well as several other colleges and universities. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she is an active advocate in the autism community.
TIME magazine included Mary in a list of “unsung female photographers of the past century.”