Visual AIDS:Project Headshot Clinic ACT puts all the posing into awareness-advocating action

MANILA, Philippines - Today, advocacy isn’t limited to streets or plenary halls. Thanks to the public exhibition platforms we know as social networking sites, advocacy has access to the world. With the World Wide Web watching 24/7, even a profile picture can help out in the bigger picture, getting the cyber masses to stop, look and listen.  

When Niccolo Cosme had started The Headshot Clinic in 2008, the advocacy was simple: a celebration of self-expression, unity and one’s visual representation in the digital age. Profile pics had the potential to be “online billboards,” he’d said. Last year, Cosme and UNAIDS used these billboards to broadcast HIV/AIDS awareness, Cosme-tically altering the cause into one that people needed to be transfixed by, as you would be, the red ribbon-wound headshots he’d taken of advocates.

This year being the third anniversary of the Headshot Clinic, Cosme does his part to make each picture speak a thousand words through Project Headshot Clinic ACT. Rounding up the original batch of participants for a reunion shoot of sorts, Cosme asked UNAIDS to come by his Lighthouse Studios to give his “heads” a mindful on the virus. Apart from an undiluted and myth-dispelling run-through on the virus (real statistics and how the virus is really contracted), counseling and private testing conducted by medical practitioners was offered in a separate room.

With absolute awareness prevailing in this year’s clinic — being aware of HIV/AIDS as not just a possibility but a reality — ACT lived up to its name. For the 235 heads who got shot this year, it wasn’t about posing but staring a virus down with information. Given our lives online, an advocacy that goes viral may just suppress a fast-spreading virus.

* * *

 To view the Project Headshot Clinic’s ACT online exhibit, head over to http://www.headshotclinic.com.