Blind Photography @ Bedford

by David M. Roth

Blind photography, at first, sounds like an oxymoron.  After all, if photography is primarily about seeing, what sort of photographs can blind or severely sight-impaired people possibly make?  And further, why would they want to?  What satisfaction could be derived from making pictures that can’t be seen?  Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists, a traveling exhibition organized by Douglas McCulloh, chief curator at the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside, answers with 130 photos by 11 artists and one collective, all of whom operate with little or no eyesight.  Only one was born blind; the rest lost their vision (or substantial parts) between childhood and adulthood.  Collectively, they overturn received notions about blindness in ways that may leave you thinking it’s the sighted who are truly blind — blinded, says McCulloh, “by an avalanche of images that taint how we see things.  We mistake visual abundance for vision, but in reality we are blind to our own blindness.”

Sight-challenged photographers, he maintains, labor under no such encumbrances – no media images,  academic indoctrination, no compulsion to measure themselves against art history.  Their visions spring from within, and their desire to communicate via photos, he says, is tantamount to a “political act,” a declaration of ability reflected in a diversity of practices, each a unique response to a particular set of visual afflictions.  The result is a photo show unlike any I’ve seen, tinged with brilliance and surprise at almost every turn.  The exhibition, which began its tour in 2009 and has so far traveled to 18 museums in five countries, fills the Bedford Gallery’s rotunda-shaped space and is supported by QR code-activated narration from the curator, who explains the methods and goals of each artist.

Long interested in how artists employ chance, McCulloh, a photographer best known for turning an airplane hangar into a camera obscura to create the world’s largest photo, became obsessed with blind photography after seeing a 1997 exhibition of Evgen Bavcar’s pictures at the Palo Alto Cultural Center, organized by Curator Signe Mayfield and Carol M. Osborne, then associate director and chief curator emerita at Stanford Museum of Art.  Parts of that exhibition, on view here, left me gasping in near disbelief.  Bavcar’s photos revive distant childhood memories using compositional techniques reminiscent of those employed by Man Ray and “spirit” photographers of yore – hucksters who, in the aftermath of wars here and abroad, provided comfort to those seeking to connect with loved ones through pictures in which ectoplasmic “ghosts” stood in for the departed.

Born in Slovenia in 1946, the artist, by age 12, had lost sight in both eyes due to two consecutive accidents, neither of which impeded his education (a Ph.D. in contemporary French aesthetics from the University of Paris-Sorbonne) or his ascent to the status of public intellectual.  Working from photos and visual memories from before he was blinded and his own contemporary photos, the Paris-based artist creates ethereal images in a darkened studio that depict lucid dream states, realized with help from friends who provide verbal feedback, which he uses to make prints that show others what only he can see.  A riderless bicycle swarmed by white swallows; a framed photo of a woman floating downstream pursued by a man whose face we can’t see; a disembodied hand caressing the face of a statue; a family portrait that seems to be emerging from a photochemical haze; and a church spire flanked by vaporous light patterns are just a few images from an oeuvre that is as rich in mystery and photographic sleight-of-hand as any made by a sighted photographer.

On this side of the Atlantic, Sacramento-based Pete Eckert occupies a similar position within the field.  Before he lost most of his sight to retinitis pigmentosa, he planned to study architecture at Yale, a career path the disease foreclosed.  His discovery of an old camera opened other options.  Today, he uses various digital and analog tools as prosthetics, enabling him to see things he otherwise couldn’t.  Most of the prints displayed here involve colored light moving across figures in a darkened room, a technique known as light painting.  The results – dancing skeletons defined by neon contrails – are electrifying; but I found myself drawn more toward two of the artist’s black-and-white prints, Saloon and Cathedral.  The first, made with a pinhole camera with multiple apertures, shows a long, narrow room illuminated by a blast of strong light.  Its ephemeral character reminded me of pictures attributed to Ted Serios, the alcoholic bellhop who, early in the 20^th century, famously (and fraudulently) claimed he could psychically project mental images onto film.  That image, unfortunately, didn’t make it into the show, but I’d feel remiss if I didn’t mention it.  The second image does appear; it shows a priest moving through a church.  A  long exposure allowed light to accumulate, turning the cleric’s robe into a translucent veil: a mystical vision.

The New York-based Seeing with Photography Collective also employs light painting in collaborative arrangements in which sighted persons operate a camera set at slow shutter speeds while models manipulate light to create the exposures. Children of the Damned, named for the 1964 British sci-fi/horror film, stands out for its evocation of a possessed child, pictured in costume with rays of light streaming out of her eyes.  Collaborations of this sort raise the age-old questions of authorship, as do those where artists rely on feedback from sighted persons.  The Seeing group addresses the issue by crediting the collective rather than the individuals involved.

Bruce Hall, whose eyesight is severely compromised, sees things only at a distance of a few inches. To make pictures, he views the output of what his camera records on a 40-inch computer monitor, which allows him to assess and compose the fragments. For the photos on view here, he trained his camera on his two severely autistic children, models for some of the show’s most arresting shots.  Desperation 0479, taken underwater, shows a boy’s face looking like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. Perception captures the boy inside a veil of water droplets. Arrested mid-air and blurred at the edges, they take on the aura of a Native American headdress.

AIDS robbed Kurt Weston of his eyesight but not his desire to make photographs, something he’d done his entire professional life until complications from the disease forced him to switch course.  Now, he uses a flatbed scanner to record people’s faces in brutal detail.  “You see every pore, every flaw, every piece of beard stubble,” observes McCulloh.  Portions not captured by the machine’s shallow focus turn blurry and distorted before fading into blackness, their resemblance to death masks forming an apt metaphor for the artist’s experience.

Michael Richard (1948-2006), an LA session guitarist before a brain tumor blinded him and later claimed his life, specialized in making architecture-based photos reminiscent of Russian Constructivism. “He couldn’t see anything without a magnifying lens held up to his eye,” McCulloh recalls.  “He would focus on a little section [of a scene] that would feed him enough information.  Sometimes he’d spend two days in a location making just one photo to see what’s there.”  Exemplars of pure abstraction, his pictures offer few clues about what they represent.  Strata Various, for example, could be a view from a catwalk overlooking a stage or a confluence of skyscrapers seen from the bottom of an airshaft.  “It’s the most concentrated seeing I have ever encountered,” McCulloh says of Richard’s practice.

Overall, the exhibition does a fine job of showing what blind photographers want us to see of their interior life.  But what of their actual vision?   What would it look like if we could see it, unmediated?  One image, Wingwall Marches on Triumphantly, by Berkeley-based Alice Wingwall, offers a possible glimpse.  The picture, shattered into vertical bands, shows the artist walking on a beach, looking like something David Hockney (in his Polaroid collage phase) might have created had he tried to replicate the freeze-frame motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge.

The late New Orleans jazz and blues pianist Henry Butler (1948-2018), the only artist in the show born blind, made pictures so rich in telling detail and meticulously composed, you’d swear they could only have been made by a sighted photographer.  Like many blind artists, Butler relied heavily on sound, and if you look closely, you can identify some of what he might have heard.  One Mardi Gras reveler, clad in a bra festooned with keys, probably made chiming metallic sounds while dancing down the street, something Butler surely would have picked up on.  Other photos, like the one of a drag queen with a bouffant hairdo teased to a high froth, reveal nothing of how, without sight, the artist framed the subject.

Pictures like these indicate just some of the ways blind people utilize senses other than sight to perceive their surroundings.  Pop culture occasionally reflects that reality. Think, for example, of the famous scene in the 1980 John Belushi/Dan Akroyd film, The Blues Brothers, where Ray Charles, playing a music store owner, scares off a thief by firing two shots into a wall, grazing, but not hitting, the would-be thief’s target, a guitar.  When asked about this, McCulloh tells a story about Pete Eckert, who he heard accurately describe the contours of a room by snapping his fingers and analyzing the sound ricocheting off walls.  The late Oaxacan photographer Gerardo Nigenda (1968-2010), whose photos carry tantalizing braille inscriptions, did the same using “the sound of rain to [mentally] construct a 3-D image” of a courtyard in that city.  “Scientific evidence,” says McCulloh, suggests “that the brain’s plastic enough to start rerouting” signals to other parts of the brain to compensate for the loss of vision.

If so, that would argue for classifying blind photography as a branch of conceptual art, one that depends not on visually impoverished written descriptions or documentation of transient events but on appeals to the senses of the sort Marcel Duchamp derisively termed “retinal art” – something that refuses to die despite a never-ending stream of obituaries.  By placing ideas and physical objects on equal footing, blind photography asserts the value of both, a rebuke to the simulated experiences now being imposed on us by Big Tech.   

“In our billion-images-a-day world,” says McCulloh, “photographs by blind photographers have meaning other photographs just don’t have.”

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“Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists” @ Bedford Gallery through September 17, 2022. 

About the author: David M. Roth is the editor, publisher and founder of Squarecylinder, where, since 2009, he has published over 400 reviews of Bay Area exhibitions.  He was previously a contributor to Artweek and Art Ltd. and senior editor for art and culture at the Sacramento News & Review.