“Photography has allowed me to be visually impaired,” says Tanvir Bush. “You can feel very looked at when you are out with your guide dog taking pictures and it is good to be able to direct that energy back just by returning that gaze with your camera. In a very real way, photography has freed me.”
Bush is one of several photographers from around the globe whose work features in an intriguing new book from Redstone Press entitled The Blind Photographer. Like many of the practitioners therein, whose work ranges from staged art photography to straight documentary and portraiture, she is not totally blind, but suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disease that leads to loss of peripheral vision and eventual blindness. “I had worked previously as a film producer and had always deferred to the director and cinematographer,” she says, “so it was very exciting for me to find my own unique voice though photography. It was a huge creative breakthrough for me.”
For sighted people, the idea of a blind photographer is a contradiction in terms, the medium being so purely visual in regard to subject, style, light and composition. The British photographer Martin Parr describes the book as “a revelation” and notes how blind photographers “capture a feeling about the world and their relationship to it through photography which is often as elegant and compelling as sighted photographers”.
That feeling about the world can be visually poetic, as in the Slovenian philosopher Evgen Bavčar’s extraordinary series of dreamscapes, or even observational, as in Ana Maria Fernandez’s intimate glimpses of a young couple kissing in a park. But it can also be expressed conceptually, as with Gerardo Nigenda’s erotic visual poem, in which braille text is punched into monochrome images of bodies and faces.
How, though, does a blind photographer manage to somehow “see”, and transform, the world through a camera in images that, in the case of the totally blind, he or she will never actually see? On a purely practical level, many blind photographers work with assistants to advise them on camera positions and composition, while others employ cutting-edge digital technology. A recent smartphone camera app developed at the University of California Santa Cruz, for instance, allows photographers with impaired vision to dispense with the shutter button, which many find difficult to locate, in favour of an upward swiping gesture. The app also uses facial recognition technology; through the phone’s inbuilt speaker it announces the number of faces in a frame and also helps the photographer using audio instructions.
If digital technology has made the hands-on process of photography altogether more accessible for blind and partially sighted people, as it has for all of us, they must also rely to a degree on ingenuity and instinct. “I sometime give vocal cues to the people I am photographing,” says Bush, “and, if they are performing for my camera, I will use marks on the ground for them and for me much as I would if I was directing actors in a film. Out on the street, though, you also learn to trust the camera as an extension of yourself almost in a paparazzi way.”
The idea of seeing without sight is a crucial one for Gina Badenoch, a Mexican photographer, who collaborated on the production of the book and is the founder of the Mexican organisation Ojos Que Sienten (the group calls itself Sight of Emotion in English, but a more literal translation is “eyes that feel”), which “encourages blind people to connect with the sighted world using the language of photography”. She tells me that people thought she was crazy when she began the project. “Even now, 10 years on, when people first hear about the project, they think it is an impossible idea,” she says. “That is because they tend to focus on sight as the only way to produce and enjoy an image. But the process of creating a photograph also involves feeling, story, perception. When you listen to the radio or read a book, you still create images in your mind because we see with our brain. So it is with blind people – through perceiving their surroundings they create images.”
Badenoch cites the work of Aarón Ramos, a hero in his native Mexico, who makes allegorical images – broken china plates whose intricate patterns have been fractured, insects and flowers whose fragile, miniature beauty is accentuated in vivid close-up – that are both acutely personal and universal. “I use my senses – hearing, touch, taste and smell – when taking pictures,” he says. “When I touch the camera lens I create an imaginary line from the lens to the object I am taking a picture of; I create the picture in my mind, I feel it and construct it to communicate feelings to the normal-visual world.”
Mickel Smithen, a British performance artist, dancer, cabaret performer and photographer, embraced photography seriously after an intensive immersive course organised by PhotoVoice, which uses digital visual storytelling to give a platform to the marginalised and disadvantaged. He describes sitting in the front row of a dance performance with his camera and listening to the “brush of bare feet on the dusty floor”, becoming alert to where and how the dancers were moving. From the sound of their breathing he knew when they had their backs turned to him or were facing him.
“I’m a dancer myself so I was drawn to capturing shapes and movement,” he says of his initial impulse to photograph his fellow dancers, “but the first thing I learned is that photography works at a different, slower pace. I had to slow right down, concentrate and take my time just to manage spatial awareness and composition.” Smithen’s painterly images of dancers utilise blur and grain, elements he was initially suspicious of because they “meant that maybe I was not so good technically”. Two years down the line, he realises that they reflect his own experience – “I often have these moments of blur myself” – as a partially sighted person who can only see the results of his own efforts by utilising advanced magnification software on his computer.
Like others in the book, both Smithen and Bush use photography as a liberating means of self-expression, even though it is not their primary medium. “I’m a novelist, first and foremost,” says Bush, “and interestingly, it would never enter my mind to consider myself a blind novelist. Because photography is not the thing I aspire to, I don’t mind the description so much, but if it was my life the way writing is, I would not allow anyone to put me in that box.”
All of the photographers in the book make work against the odds in various ways and for different reasons. They subvert the idea of photography as an act of looking and are united by an often elaborate imaginative vision of the world, rather than an actual one – memory, emotions and experience all feed into an acute and heightened way of seeing. “Even a blind person has visual equipment, optical needs, as someone who is longing for light in a dark room,” writes Evgen Bavčar, “From this desire, I photograph.”
The Blind Photographer is published by Redstone Press (£29.95) on 8 September. To order a copy go to www.theredstoneshop.com
