Reflection Abstract 80

Check out the interview in BEHIND THE LENS, YOUR LENS

Craig Royal is an award winning visually impaired fine art photographer / digital artist from the Tampa Bay area. One of his photos was awarded the “Best in Show” at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts Members’ Show recently. We talked with him about his work and his experiences.

Share on Facebook

via Not Seeing is Believing : Playboy.com.

Share on Facebook

I think that for a blind person there is no intermediate space. Things are either there or they’re not there. You know, you are walking along the road and suddenly a tree hits you smack in the face. It wasn’t there a minute ago — now it’s there. Of course that would be unimaginable for a sighted person, who would just never walk straight into a tree.

Says John Hull in his auto biography “Touching the Rock”.

That non-existence of intermediate space, is something that the brain has to adapt to, and adapt it will. So much so, that I think that this is the cause of my photographic stagnation: as the perception of space disappears from my way of knowing the world, it can’t be expressed by the medium that is the eminent expression of that: photography. So after fading gradually away, photographing has now all but ceased to be a means of artistic expression for me. Sound is, and time based things perhaps can be, and tactile objects, but that’s developing, and it’s groping at the moment. I wish there was a “blind multisensory artists” group, like there is a blind photographers group.

It’s a struggle, and an experience of profound loss. Maybe my main mode in art is the photographic, because I start from the fullness of reality that’s in front of me: that is the input for my thought process. But no longer, or not at the moment, for that delicious click of the shutter, the moment of capture, because it has started to mean Nothing.

Postscriptum: I lifted the John Hull quote from an essay by composer Darren Copeland, titled Associative Listening. In that essay, there is this tantalizing passage:

Without conscientious efforts to approach environmental sounds with some imagination and a sensitive social awareness, the language for coping with the everyday sound world will remain crude and ineffectual. If sound shapes people’s experience in the world, then a vocabulary for documenting this interrelationship needs to develop. John Hull provides one example. He hears a sound around him. It affects him in a certain way. The impact on his mind leads to a chain of related thoughts and musings. He then records these thoughts into a Dictaphone and later shapes them into a piece of writing. The whole process in my opinion is informed by associative listening. On the basis of such listening can one ever approach the enormous task of reading the acoustic environment as a record of social experience?

.

Share on Facebook

soft light crocus

“I know I am new, but I feel like the whole world has opened up to me through this group and photography.” This came to BP’s inbox today form one of our members.  The photographer, bbrasley, has chronicled her transition into photography on her blog, Losing Vision Gaining Insight, in her post, Blind Photography. bbrasley write about how this community helped her find a new way to see the world:

With the inspiration of the blindphotographers website, I began to create a digital world where I can see the beauty that I can no longer see in the “real” natural world.

bbrasley goes on to show an example of how she uses Photoshop to find the real image buried in her pictures. The photo about, soft light crocus, was lost in the glare and noise  when she snapped the original digital negative.  Bringing that file into Photoshop and onto her large screen monitor, bbrasley was able to find this wonderful nugget.

Thanks for sharing your story, bbrasley! Please go on to read about Blind Photography at Losing Vision Gaining Insight.

Share on Facebook

A Janela Da Alma

There is a 2001 Brazilian movie, A Janela Da Alma (Window of the Soul), about blind photographers. The New York Times has a review of the movie. From the NY Times:

“Brazilian filmmakers Joao Jardim and Walter Carvalho ponder the old adage “the eyes are the windows to the soul” as they explore vision and perception in their 2002 documentary A Janela Da Alma (Window of the Soul). Beginning with an interview with Brazilian jazz musician Hermeto Pascoal, Carvalho and Jardim attempt to make sense of how the musician perceives his world with a pair of impaired eyes that appear to simultaneously look in different directions. From there, the Brazilian co-directors interview a number of famous subjects with varying degrees of ocular health, ranging from the non-vision impaired director Wim Wenders to blind photographer Evgen Bavcar, while both the filmmakers and the interview subjects ponder how their lives and existences would be different had their abilities or inabilities to see the world around them been different. Released in Brazil in the summer of 2002 to mixed reviews, A Janela Da Alma was screened at a number of film festivals around the world in late 2002 into early 2003. ~ Ryan Shriver, All Movie Guide”

Here is the trailer with subtitles:

Janela da Alma – Trailer from MOVIE&ART on Vimeo.

Window of the Soul is available online and I have added it below, but it is in multiple languages with no subtitles. English subtitles are available online in several places, including here, but I have not figured out how to watch the film full screen and see the subtitles. I can not find it on Netflix either, so I have not seen the entire film.

There are segments of the documentary on YouTube. including these segment featuring Wim Wenders.

Any help finding the documentary with subtitles in its entirety would be appreciated.

Tim O’Brien is a regular columnist on Blind Photographers. Legally blind, Tim writes about accessibility, photography and, occasionally, both together. You can find out more about Tim on his blog or by following him on twitter.

Share on Facebook

Scott Wyden Kivowitz

Scott Wyden Imagery has a nice post about “Being a color blind photographer“.

It has its moments. I am not going lie and say I just get by because I don’t. I need help like other color blind photographers out there. In fact, when I was in college and taking the color course I needed help then. My color blindness isn’t as bad as some others. Some people have it really bad. I get some orange and browns mixed up. Sometimes a dark blue and black can look the same. For me it depends on the colors that are next to each other and then other colors surrounding them. When it is dark out it makes it really tough.

Color Blindness

Scott graciously includes us in his list of resources. Red the full essay at Being a color blind photographer — Scott Wyden Imagery.

Share on Facebook

Image by Vince Thacker

The BBC., via its BBC – Pods and Blogs, is again featuring the work of a blind photographer. The February 9, 2010, edition of this podcast talks with British photographer, Vince Thacker.

Though accessibility should be incorporated into all websites, as usual on Pods and Blogs, it’s the things you do that are really interesting. Vince Thacker is a blind photographer. He described how a visual medium fors for him and how he presents his photographs on-line.

Read more at BBC – Pods and Blogs.

Share on Facebook

Dr Simon Hayhoe, Editor of ECO: On Blindness and the Arts and has written two books on the subject of blindness and art, God Money & Politics and Arts, Culture & Blindness. He lives in Leicester, UK.

Photography by blind and visually impaired artists is fast developing into a new genre in the field of contemporary art . This is neither a patronising nor wildly optimistic statement, but one based on the unique qualities of tone, texture and the subjects of these photographs. Two forms of this art in particular provide examples of these aesthetic features:

The first form of art work is the studio and landscape work being developed by blind and visually impaired collectives, either working in small geographical areas, such as the Seeing With Photography collective, New York (http://seeingwithphotography.com/), or through web based groups such as Tim O’Brien’s Blind Photographers collective (http://photos.blindphotographers.org/). What I get most from these groups’ work is a sense of depth in the tone used in the photographs, something that did not surprise me when I first came across it.

During research for Arts, Culture and Blindness, I was lucky enough to observe a legally blind student with achromatism – total colour blindness – studying for an A Level in Art, and discovered that she saw better in a dark room under infra-red light than many sighted people did whilst using similar equipment. This finding was reinforced when I later read Oliver Sack’s wonderful observations of a colony of achromatics on the Pacific atoll of Pingelap, who saw the local landscape better than the sighted population as the sun set. In such cases, the perception of tone was far more intense for people with no recognition of colour, making the experience of contrast far more important. This finding is most apparent in many of the black & white images seen in collections of the blind and visually impaired collectives. It is also, however, observable in the colour photographs in these collections, too. In these circumstances, the artists again are experiencing colour purely as tone, and therefore see more enriched tones than the subtle variations that sighted people notice.

In addition, strong colour is also of the utmost importance to those who are not achromatic, as many of these artists are more reliant on intense colours to enhance what little vision they may have left. This appears to be a contradiction for many who view these works without experience of blindness, as they assume that blind and visually impaired artists appreciate less or no colour at all. However, it is a brilliant quirk of a separate world with a rich and varied sensorial experience that these forms of art teach us a little of what it is like to have compromised vision.

The second form of art work that I have observed is produced during exercises involving novice photographers who are blind or visually impaired, the vast majority of whom are school aged students. Each of these students are given a simple camera without any adjustable parts and asked to take photographs of different elements of their everyday lives. This form of project was begun in San Francisco, US, by Tony Deifell and his organisation Seeing Beyond Sight (http://www.seeingbeyondsight.org/) in 2002, but has now been
taken on by many schools and organisations worldwide.

The art work that is produced by such projects is often fascinating but always moving and socially illuminating. This is mainly due to the subjects of these photographs, although at first appearing to be mundane, taking on a quality of child like fascination within a sense of movement and a carefully organised environment. Perhaps the best and most moving example of such image creation was conducted by Partho Bhowmick and his organisation Blind With Camera (http://www.blindwithcamera.org) in the school for the blind in Mumbai, India. The images that he collected from this project show an unimaginable world of institutionalisation and groups of friends, contrasts of dark insides with baking hot outsides, shadows, small intrigues and longings.

But what most entertains me about the images from all of these projects is the participants’ lack of regard for formal rules of composition or subject choice. This is a group of students who have little or no training in art forms and so can take pictures with an abandon that gives the viewer a new perspective both on what it is to be blind and also what it is like to have different conventions and expectations. If this genre is to be appreciated to its fullest, it is perhaps these elements of the exciting new world of photography by blind and visually impaired people that we will take with us most.

Hayhoe S (2008) Arts, Culture & Blindness. Youngstown, New York: Teneo Press
Sacks O (1998) The Island of the Color Blind. New York: Vintage

Share on Facebook

"Night Flight" by Kurt Weston

LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired’s Insights exhibit was featured recently in the New York Times. “‘Insights’ Showcases Blind and Visually Impaired Artists” gives an nice overview of the exhibit and it artists.

Now in its 20th year, “Insights” is the country’s pre-eminent selected exhibition of paintings, photographs and mixed-media pieces by legally blind artists. What began as an event focused on works of purely tactile interest — just 13 the first year — has evolved into a show of some 120 pieces where the emphasis is on the visual, and on an interpretation of it more in line with the one Ms. Kitazawa had in mind.

Featuring all genres of art, Insights puts serious though into what the exhibit really means, for art and for the blind.

“The exhibition is framed to be about limits and what can be done within them,” said Lawrence Rinder, the director of the Berkeley Art Museum, who was a juror for “Insights” this year. That thematic framing, he added, locates the show’s blind artists very much in the tradition of artists in general. “We all have limits of perception, and all artists work within that envelope.”

Accompanying the article, ” ‘Insights’ Showcases Blind and Visually Impaired Artists“, the times has a slideshow sampling some of the artwork, Art by the Blind. The Insights web site also offers this great video featuring one of the painters.

Tim O’Brien is a regular columnist on Blind Photographers. Legally blind, Tim writes about accessibility, photography and, occasionally, both together. You can find out more about Tim on his blog or by following him on twitter.

Share on Facebook

APH Musseum

The American Printing House for the Blind has announced their Nineteenth Annual Juried Art Competition and Exhibition for Artists Who Are Visually Impaired or Blind. The exhibition, APH InSights 2010: Visions From the Mind, requires entries be submitted by April 1, 2010, for preschool through high school and April 15, 2010, for adults.

Make Your Dreams Come True! Enter APH InSights 2010! The American Printing House for the Blind (APH) invites visually impaired and blind artists of all ages to submit artwork to APH InSights 2010! This art competition and exhibition is exclusively for blind artists and draws entries from across the U.S. and around the world.

See APH Museum: Enter the InSights Art Competition for rules and forms.

Tim O’Brien is a regular columnist on Blind Photographers. Legally blind, Tim writes about accessibility, photography and, occasionally, both together. You can find out more about Tim on his blog or by following him on twitter.

Share on Facebook