John Ranard: Biography

John Ranard is a social documentary photographer based in New York. He began photographing Russia’s emerging HIV epidemic in 1995 and is currently editing these photographs into a book that emphasizes an approach to AIDS involving harm reduction, which seeks humane and practical solutions to stem the spread of the disease.

AIDS Foundation East/West and Medecins Sans Frontieres jointly published a book of Ranard’s photographs, The Fire Within, as a policy statement on the need for harm reduction in Eastern Europe. His work for a 1997 New York Times story on the AIDS epidemic in the former Soviet Union won the first place Pictures of Year award for Issue Reporting Photo Story. The photographs are included in the anthology Pandemic: Facing AIDS (2003).

Ranard has exhibited at the Andrei Sakharov Museum in Moscow, the Center for Contemporary Art in Kiev, de Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, the Moscow Center for Prison Reform, and the Museum of World Culture in Gothenberg, Sweden, among other institutions.

Ranard’s portfolio “The Brutal Aesthetic” won the Kentucky Arts Grant—Al Smith Fellowship, and was published in Joyce Carol Oates’s On Boxing, which was named one of the Best Photography Books of 1987 by the International Center of Photography.

Ranard’s photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the University of Louisville Photographic Archives, and the Andrei Sakharov Museum.