“The Tragedy Next Door” was the title of an article in DIE ZEIT that extolled Andrea Diefenbach’s penetrating photojournalistic piece on the AIDS epidemic in Ukraine, whose consequences remain underestimated to this day. Since very recently, the country has had the dubious honor of being the European record holder where new cases of AIDS are concerned. It is also one of the places in the world where AIDS is spreading the fastest. In spring 2006 Diefenbach accompanied a few HIV-positive women and men as they went about their daily lives in Odessa, a harbor city in southern Ukraine. Aids in Odessa was honored in January 2007 at the Plat(t)form at the Fotomuseum Winterthur.For our Edition Hatje Cantz, Diefenbach has selected a picture of Natasha, who was twenty-three at the time Diefenbach created her quiet, yet emphatically urgent series.
