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Matinee: Positive Exposure
3 August 2024
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 564th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Positive Exposure.
This two-minute video from Bast Bramhall highlights last year's Positive Exposure exhibition at Creighton University's Lied Art Gallery. The exhibit featured photographs of people with rare diseases, including Jansen's disease, NZF1, Phelan-McDermid syndrome, multiple sclerosis, tuberous sclerosis complex and others among the 10,000 known rare diseases.
Positive Exposure is also the name of the non-profit founded by Rick Guidotti after a chance encounter with a woman with albinism at a bus stop in New York City in 1997. He was so struck by her unconventional beauty, he dug into medical textbooks to learn more about albinism, which is an absence of pigmentation in the hair and skin. But as a photographer whose clients included Ives St Laurent, Revlon and L'Oreal, he was put off by the dehumanizing depictions he found in the textbooks.
In June 1998, Positive Exposure made its first appearance in the LIFE Magazine cover story Redefining Beauty. Guidotti's five-page photo essay featured people with albinism alongside quotes addressing stigma, discrimination, prejudice, hatred and exclusion simply because of that physical difference.
And he's been making beautiful portraits of people with rare diseases ever since.
The video begins by introducing one of Guidotti's subjects, a 20-year-old man, with his family. We follow them as they attend the exhibit and see his portrait, larger than life, exhibited there.
Guidotti appears about the 40-second mark saying, "As an artist, I refuse to see beauty only on covers of magazines."
A few of the images are shared in the video but you can see more in the 2015 photo essay published in The Guardian. And you can hear more about Positive Exposure in his TED talk titled From Stigma to Supermodel. Guidotti has also published Change How You See, See How You Change, which explores Positive Exposure's 25 years portraying the beauty in genetic diversity.
You can never get enough of beauty, after all.