James Adams: Toxic Public Welfare

This image is ethnographic in that it represents a contemporary controversy over how to understand and address the transmission of HIV through the use of intravenous drugs. But, at the same time, as an unsuspecting viewer, all we see is a box of sterile needles. That is, without context, the viewer could come to wildly different conclusions about the argument behind this picture. This is not intended as a critique of the image but rather an opportunity. In the design statement, I would suggest playing up this ambiguity of the image's meaning and relating that back to the ambiguity of the concept of "public welfare." That is, I think the ambivalence of the needle as a technology that both saves and endangers lives could be made analogous to the potential for certain deployments of the concept of "public welfare" to be rendered toxic. How does a box of sterile needles become morally fraught? How does the premeditated endangerment of the lives of people struggling with addiction become a moral good? How are these developments related?