Bruce Hall, untitled 1 & 2, from autism series, 2009 color print 11.25” x 15”

Blind photographers will exhibit at the 19th Annual International
Los Angeles Photographic Art Exposition this month. The Blind Photographers Guild, made up of Pete Eckert, Bruce Hall and Alex de Jong, will exhibit their work January 14 – 17, 2010 in Santa Monica, CA. More details here. This is another exciting opportunity for blind photographers to show their work as well as for the world to see through our eyes. Congratulations to Pete, Bruce and Alex (an integral member of this community) for teaming up on this project.

Alex has generaously shared some of his images from the exhibit:

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Dogs Romping on Ambleside Beach

Blind Photographer and contributor to this website, Cathy McKie (aka EYZWIDESHUT), has had one of her images featured in the latest Schmap Vancouver travel guide. Her image, Dogs Romping on Ambleside Beash, is one of several images showing Ambleside Park.

As the name suggests, this parkland is a perfect place for a beachside amble or jog. It has views of downtown Vancouver, Stanley Park, and the Lions Gate Bridge. It is a popular meeting place for nature lovers and health buffs. It has a fitness circuit, dog path, bird sanctuary, pitch ‘n’ putt and the Centennial Seawalk. It is also the home of the Ferry Building, a heritage gallery that showcases work by local artisans. During the summer, a vintage steam locomotive, the Royal Hudson, passes through the park twice daily.

The guide is also available in as an iPhone app.

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I’ll start with a personal example of what I’m talking about – I have retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that narrows your visual field through a gradual loss of peripheral vision. Admittedly this does cause several problems of its own where photography is concerned in that I can’t drive to exotic locations for landscapes, and if I do manage to get there there’s always a danger that I’ll trip over something & possibly damage my camera, but if we play devil’s advocate it could also be argued that I naturally frame everything I see. There’s no need for me to hold my fingers up in front of my face as a makeshift frame to show the composition as it’s naturally there anyway, and any distracting peripherals aren’t distracting to me as I don’t see them at all.

From various articles I’ve read, the key to black & white photography is all in the tones & contrast. With normal vision, colour makes this harder to visualise – i.e. “is that deep red lighter or darker than the blue next to it?” As I see in colour myself, I’m only guessing, but I suspect I could more easily differentiate between tonal values if everything was seen in greyscale, so there could be an advantage to not having any colour vision.

For sight that is blurry or patchy, there could be a natural leaning towards colour & overall form, without getting clogged up in the details of the scene. This in itself would help with general composition, and may also help to spot opportunities for good abstract photography that a fully sighted peer might not notice without some experimentation in focus & depth of field.

I’m sure there are other examples, but as I’m no expert on visual impairment (or photography for that matter), I’m struggling to think of anything specific. As a more general argument, it could be said that photography is a means of portraying something beautiful or interesting that you as a photographer see in a particular scene, from a perspective that others may miss. If you naturally see things differently anyway, surely you’re part-way there?

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How can someone be a blind photographer? Or rather, why would someone want to be? A new exhibit on display at the University of California Riverside/California Museum of Photography explores these questions, through art created by some of the world’s most renowned blind photographers. Evgen Bavcar, one of the featured artists in the Sight Unseen exhibit, says, “My images are fragile; I’ve never seen them, but I know they exist, and some of them have touched me deeply.”

I talked with exhibit curator, Douglas McCulloh, a few weeks ago about the exhibit. I will have more on that interview soon.

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We are a group of blind photographers. All of us have to contend with various degrees of visual impairment. If you look around on the internet, it seems there are other blind photographers and so a number of them was bound to use flickr to share photographs. The “blind photographers” flickr group was created to offer a venue for discussion, to share our individual and joint vision, to admire each other’s photographs, bug members with technical question, and generally, to hang out and enjoy each other’s company. This worked so well, that we now have a membership of 130 photographers and have branched out to other spaces on the internet: facebook, twitter, the old “best of blind photographers” blog, which has now incarnated in this dedicated wordpress blog. As we value discussion and photography both, we decided to maintain two blogs: a curated photoblog as a showcase for work by blind photographers, and this blog, as a venue for blind photographers to discuss, to share and to rant (occasionally).
So, please feel free to be part of our community, join us on flickr, find us on facebook, show your work and share its story with us. We plan on porting the discussions we are having on flickr regarding technique and philosophy to this blog too, in a series of “blindsighted” articles, while we hope that blind photographers everywhere will include their profiles on this blog and their work on our photoblog.

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