Photograph by Katja Heinemann

I photographed the collapse of the Twin Towers from Jersey City’s harbor, just across the Hudson River from the World Trade Center. After the first tower had fallen, I briefly went home and saw what I had just witnessed reproduced on TV. I sensed that my experience of watching the South Tower fall was being supplanted by the repetitive, numbing loop of imagery on CNN, accompanied by the pundits’ analyses of what it all had to mean.

I arrived back at the harbor just as the second tower fell. By this time, evacuation efforts had begun and people were being ferried across the river to safety. A young woman, in shock, covered with dust, told me about seeing people jump from the towers to their deaths. Her testimony brought home how removed I felt from what was happening across the river.

Like many others in Jersey City, I had been on my way to Lower Manhattan when the attacks occurred. We were unable to cross into the city that day. All afternoon, as the Manhattan skyline burned, people came to the waterfront to take in the sight. For the first time since Pearl Harbor, an act of war and destruction, of outside aggression, had been visited upon America. Yet although we were eye witnesses to the events unfolding in time, separated from the scene only by the width of the river, there prevailed a sense of detachment that suspended onlookers in a strange limbo on this beautiful early fall day.

The following morning I was one of maybe three people who managed to get on the first – and only – passenger ferry into Manhattan.

Photograph by Katja Heinemann

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On September 11, 2001, Katja Heinemann had just moved to the NYC area from Chicago to pursue a career as a freelance photojournalist. Today she is living in Brooklyn and works on long term documentary projects while shooting reportage, portraiture and multimedia assignments for American and European clients. She joined Aurora in 2003.

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This week, as we approach the 10 year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Aurora Photos is publishing a series of essays on our blog by Aurora photographers and staff who were in New York, Washington, or Pennsylvania on that day, or covered the events of 9/11 in the days following the attacks.

Aurora Select Photographer Katja Heinemann was featured on MSNBC for her continuing project “Graying of AIDS”. The two videos feature the process of aging while living with HIV/AIDS. “The Graying of AIDS” combines portraits and oral histories of long-term survivors living with HIV/AIDS with information to increase awareness, sensitivity, and collaboration among care-giving professionals. For more information please visit grayingofaids.org

To see Katja Heinemenn’s videos, visit MSNBC
To see images from Select Photographer Katja Heinemann, visit Aurora Photos.

A still image from "Standing Up to Stigma: Family fights HIV discrimination." Katja Heinemann / Aurora Photos

Aurora photographer Katja Heinemann has extensively covered the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Her latest piece, entitled “Standing Up to Stigma: Family fights HIV discrimination,” tells the story of Dr. Robert Franke, who was kicked out of an assisted living home in Arkansas because of his HIV-positive status. The video was published by the AARP Bulletin.

Katja is also currently working on a larger project, called the Graying of AIDS,  covering how people age with HIV and AIDS in the U.S. The current project came out of a documentary produced for Time Magazine in 2006.

To see more work by Katja Heinemann, visit her stock archive at Aurora Photos and her portfolio at Aurora Select.

The July 13, 2010 cover of The Times of London’s Body & Soul health supplement features a portrait of Carlos Leon taken by Aurora photographer Katja Heinemann.

Of the shoot, Katja says, “Interestingly, photographing Carlos Leon I had expected him to be media savvy and photogenic.  Instead, aside from the intial posed portrait that he graciously obliged to, I encountered someone so used to being hounded by paparazzi that he instinctively shields himself from the camera at every opportunity, resulting in a bizarre dance of me following him around the room trying to get a action shots of him teaching his class, catching a moment here and there where he wasn’t turning away from me……”

To see more Katja’s assignment portfolio, click here.

To see Katja Heinemann’s stock imagery, click here.

Aurora Select photographer Katja Heinemann went on assignment for the July/August 2010 Anniversary double issue of Smithsonian Magazine. Katja photographed MIT scientist John Ochsendorf in conjunction with his installation of an ancient vault building technique at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City.  The shoot had to take place in Boston, as the installation wasn’t completed in time for the magazine deadline, and it turns out that the Boston Public Library had several historic rooms that feature traditional vaulted ceilings, so she had a great fall-back location.

To see more work by Katja Heinemann, visit Aurora Photos.

A still image from "Standing Up to Stigma: Family fights HIV discrimination." Katja Heinemann / Aurora Photos

Aurora photographer Katja Heinemann has extensively covered the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Her latest piece, entitled “Standing Up to Stigma: Family fights HIV discrimination,” tells the story of Dr. Robert Franke, who was kicked out of an assisted living home in Arkansas because of his HIV-positive status. The video was published by the AARP Bulletin.

Katja is also currently working on a larger project, called the Graying of AIDS,  covering how people age with HIV and AIDS in the U.S. The current project came out of a documentary produced for Time Magazine in 2006.

Aurora Photos: What gave you the idea to pursue the growth of older Americans with AIDS as a long-term project?

Katja Hienemann: Covering HIV/AIDS in the US, like most long term projects, began with a very strong, gut level reaction – in this case to the realization that 20 years into the epidemic, HIV/AIDS stigma was still as strong as ever. In 1999, I encountered some of the teens having come of age as the first generation of kids who were infected at birth, and were now going through puberty with the shameful secret of having a sexually transmissible disease.  That first project, On Borrowed Time, lasted six years and was an incredible learning experience both as a journalist covering public health issues, and as a visual reporter.  It was the beginning of my immersion in multi-dimensional story telling, using audio and additional materials (such as the kids’ art works and poetry) to fully get at the hidden aspects of a disease. HIV/AIDS  is no longer visually explicit in the West, where the physical manifestations of HIV/AIDS are in most cases successfully treated by medical advancements.

The Graying of AIDS is the mirror image of that first project. I had read the stunning statistics of how the disease was aging in the US, and realized it was a great angle to cover the story for the 25th anniversary of the epidemic. Time Magazine commissioned me to produce a multimedia essay for them in 2006, after already having published the pediatric work in 2002. The success of both pieces, in my mind, lies in finding an angle that held enough interest for the readership of a mainstream newsweekly at a time where HIV in the United States was a non-topic.  In the public perception the epidemic here is over; the problem solved by medical technology. In reality numbers of new infections have never abated, and the statistics in some areas of the country, especially Washington, DC and the Southern States, rival those of developing countries around the world.

A.P.: Why is this subject important to cover?

K.H.: Research shows that by 2015, more than half of all people living with HIV in the US will be over 50. Thanks to advances in medical treatment, people are living longer with the virus – in some cases more than 20 years (and counting). At the same time, older adults are rarely targeted in HIV prevention campaigns, and often do not realize that their behaviors may put them at risk for HIV infection. As the population of older Americans at risk for – or living with – HIV/AIDS grows, the daily realities and challenges of their lives remain largely invisible in our youth-oriented culture.  After the launch of that first Time.com multimedia piece, I was approached by people in the public health and nursing school fields and asked whether the materials could be used in classrooms and for training purposes.  Those requests became the germ of the idea to keep pursuing the topic, and to specifically address care-giving professionals as a main target audience.

A.P.: What has your experience been like working with your photo subjects for the Graying of AIDS project?

K.H.: This has been an amazing experience over the years. It is still incredibly hard to find people willing to stand up and tell their stories, in the face of continuing stigma. One of the things I found challenging is that pretty much everyone who agreed to be interviewed has been living with the disease for many, many years, so they’ve had lots of time to reflect on their experience and come to grips with wanting to be publicly identified as HIV positive. Because of this, the project is more heavily slanted towards telling the stories of long term survivors and is missing the voices of people who are more newly infected.  That said, I was able to interview an extraordinarily diverse group of people, and every single one of them had, in their own way, an  incredibly nuanced, reflective and eloquent way of sharing their experience with me.

A.P.: What’s it like working with a team from different fields of expertise on this project?

K.H.: This is a total dream project for me. The support of the OSI Distribution grant allowed me to team up, first and foremost, with a researcher from the Public Health field, to take the stories beyond the realm of journalism and oral histories, and place them in a larger context. I love working collaboratively, shaping the direction the work is growing together with Naomi Schegloff, MPH, while also assuming the role of creative director of a team comprising people from so many different professional backgrounds. While I’ve had a longstanding history of working on the graphic design aspects of my HIV/AIDS work with Cliff Questel, this project has added Samantha Beech to adjust a WordPress template to our needs, Bob Sacha has given great advice on the multimedia editing front, Eugene Jho has tamed Naomi’s and my run-on sentences, and Sarah Bernstein is creating original music to accompany all the stories. It couldn’t get much better, honestly. Actually, it could – any future funding would assure that all these people eventually get paid what they’re worth.

A.P.: What do you hope your work accomplishes?

K.H.: I am hoping to contribute to a discussion that is just beginning to gain some momentum in this country.  There are many voices gathering as we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the AIDS epidemic this coming June, to call attention to the fact that as a nation, we have to bring the issue of HIV back to the forefront of public consciousness.  This is a preventable disease that is allowed to take much too heavy a toll on too many people’s lives – especially people of color and people of marginalized communities, and it is a disease of poverty here just as much as in the rest of the world.  The only way to break the cycle of new infections is frank talk and open dialog, whether that is in schools, in churches and houses of worship, and perhaps just as importantly, among friends and families.

By focusing on the specific topic of older adults, The Graying of AIDS is actually confronting two epidemics, in a way: HIV and AIDS, of course, but also a cultural epidemic of ageism which renders older adults and the daily realities of aging in our country largely invisible. The reason so many people are initially taken aback by this project is because without realizing it, many of us have internalized the cultural messages that associate sexuality with youth and negate the sexuality of older adults. Depictions of Betty White as a sexual being on Saturday Night Live are comedic, somehow. But the need for companionship and human touch don’t go away just because we grow older, and many older adults – whether they have recently rejoined the dating pool because of divorce or the death of a life partner or relocation to a new community – find themselves negotiating new sexual relationships for the first time since the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. And many of them grew up at a time when you didn’t really talk about these things, you just sort of did them. Most people don’t really want to think about their parents or grandparents having sex, but if we love them and we want them to stay healthy, we’d better get over it and make sure they have the information they need to stay safe, whether they hear it from us, their peers, or their care providers.

To see more work by Katja Heinemann, visit her stock archive at Aurora Photos and her portfolio at Aurora Select.

Aurora Select photographer Katja Heinemann traveled to Los Angeles, Wyoming and Long Island to produce portraits of teenagers who had undergone elective plastic surgeries for the current issue of People Magazine. Says’ Heinemann; “The main challenge for me was to come up with compelling portraits that showed off the kids’ surgeries… In the end, subtlety won out in the editing process!” The entire article can be seen in the April 5, 2010 edition of People Magazine.

To see more work by Katja Heinemann, visit Aurora Select.

Aurora photographer Katja Heinemann’s portraits of Denis Dutton, a philosopher of art and the author of The Art Instinct, have been published in the fall 2009 issue of Mercedes Magazine, which talks about the philosopher’s belief that all mankind is born with an innate instinct for beauty and art. “I photographed Professor Dutton on The High Line in Chelsea, a new park created from a disused stretch of elevated railway which offers great urban views and backgrounds as well as being a landscaped oasis,” says Heinemann.

To see more work by Katja Heinemann, visit Aurora Photos.