By Gary Knight
Co-Founder, VII Photo Agency and Chair, IMAGES TO STOP TUBERCULOSIS Advisory Board

When I was walking around the Rajan Babu TB Hospitial in New Delhi a few years ago with Dr Banavalikar as my host, I wondered what it was about the social make-up of the male and female wards we were touring that was so very odd. The rooms were the same size, the same cows were peering through the windows, the beds were the same and all full. It very slowly dawned on me that in the male wards, I saw men being cared for by their families-bathed, fed and tenderly massaged by their wives. In the female ward I saw only women-alone. I asked the good Doctor why and he explained to me that many women are abandoned in hospital because they are deemed useless; their husbands prefer to find a new wife to fulfill the daily obligation of labour, childcare and the preparation of food rather than wait for the old wife to recover. As if staring death in the face weren't enough, such is the stigma of tuberculosis.

I have often wondered as I have journeyed around the world how widespread a problem tuberculosis would be if it weren't for the fact that it is viewed principally as a disease of the poor and of poor nations. Tuberculosis is not only a personal stigma. The governments of those nations where it is endemic are reluctant to shine a light on it, believing that by non-recognition, they will somehow save face on the international stage.

As a photographer I trade in imagery, not statistics. The statistics of tuberculosis are all around us-almost 5 000 dying every day, so many of them children slain by the greatest killer disease of man. Statistics are vital, but we should not let them sanitize the problem and create distance between those who suffer and those whose responsibility it should be to prevent more suffering. What we hope to do with the collection of photographs Christian Caujolle has curated is-to paraphrase the Irish statesman Edmund Burke-substantiate shadows and lend existence to nothing." These photographs are about the people who make up those statistics, and we believe that by using the universal and emotional language of photography, we can demand a response where statistics won't.

Like most journalists I have spent my professional life tilting a lance at windmills. I long ago reconciled myself to accept the evidence that anyone I photographed who was about to die would not be saved by my photography, it was too late for them. Like many of the photographers whose work you see here, I think that when I turn away after taking an image of someone in distress, I leave something behind, some evidence of concern and some recognition of their suffering. This direct and personal exchange has become as important to me as any other consequence of the photographs.

I believe that the collaboration between small communities, the media, politics, and science can effect change as long as there are still people who are willing to try, and it is the act of trying that is so very important. I hope that such photographs may one day have the chance of preventing some future catastrophe but for that we must collaborate, and if we do nothing at least the photography will serve as a record that we did- nothing.