Seeing Beyond Sight: Photographs by Blind Teenagers [Hardcover]

Tony Deifell (Author), Robert Coles (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 16, 2007

With its ambitious, seemingly paradoxical premise, Seeing Beyond Sight is a book of photographs taken by teenagers with limited or no sight. Seeing Beyond Sight documentshow educator Tony Deifell taught his blind students to take pictures as an innovative, multi-sensory means of self-expression. Their intuitive images are surprising and often beautiful. Complementing the photographs are the students' own words explaining what the process and images mean to them. Seeing Beyond Sight is a rare book of visual art and an educational resource that speaks with inspirational power, not only to the visually impaired community, but to anyone who has ever considered what it means to see.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In 1992 Deifell started a photography club at North Carolina's Governor Morehead School for the Blind. From three students, the club burgeoned into a class entitled "Sound Shadows." Culling from the teenage students' photos during his five years at the school, Deifell mounts an impressive showcase in chapters--"Distortion," "Refraction," "Reflection," "Transparence," and "Illuminance"--whose titles he explains in the introduction. Ranging in degree of blindness from low vision to light perception to no vision, the students used point-and-shoot cameras and, as "Sound Shadows" suggests, aural and other sensory cues to find subjects. Reason and fancy played large parts, too. To photograph the wind, a 13-year-old shot leaves scattered on the ground. One girl's first picture was an act of protest; she shot a badly cracked campus sidewalk and sent the image to the superintendent. For a self-portrait, another 13-year-old shot her reflection in a car's passenger-side mirror. Some illustrated dreams and fears very effectively. All made vigorous and moving "this is my world" pictures. Not a few made high-order "art" photos. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Tony Deifell is a San Francisco-based visual artist and social entrepreneur. He taught photography for five years at a school for the blind in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 152 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; First Edition edition (April 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811853497
• ISBN-13: 978-0811853491
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,159,822 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tony Deifell is a visual artist and social entrepreneur. He has spent over a decade creating youth-generated media projects, including From the Hip, Youth Voice Radio, and ISM, which was recognized by the White House as a national model of diversity education. He is Chief Strategist for KaBOOM!, advises film and television projects, and continues to develop participatory media-making productions, including wdydwyd? (http://www.wdydwyd.com). Tony was an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, taught documentary studies at Duke University, and was a national leadership fellow with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. He taught photography at Governor Morehead School for the Blind from 1992 to 1997. He lives in San Francisco.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Perception Beyond Seeing. March 3, 2007

By Clare Mulvany

Format:Hardcover

This book is a gem. It's a reminder that perception is so much more than sight and that seeing is a way of engagement with the world rather than simply looking.

As the photographs unfold, they take you on a journey into what is relevant in the photographers' lives; how light and dark play as guides; how cracks in the pavement interrupt; how what some take for granted, others are denied. The photos open up new ways of seeing and understanding our environment and the spectrum of people who interact with it.

Deifell's sensitive and thoughtful text gives a further dimension to the book, gently provoking the reader to examine how they see others, and how they see themselves.

Highly recommended.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars New perspectives March 10, 2007

By James Fruchterman

Format:Hardcover

I just finished reading Seeing Beyond Sight, and it is both about blindness and much more. My work for almost twenty years has been helping blind people, and the idea that visually people take photographs is not to me foreign at all. A significant number of blind people are low vision, and photographs can be a way to visually see things that their eyes don't show them. Some of the students in this book fall into this group where photos become an aid.

But, most of the photographers in Tony Deifell's book cannot see the photographs they are taking. Yet, they get tremendous value out of them. Just like sighted people, the students proudly show their photos around to other people. Becoming a photographer unlocks the voice of still others. One photo becomes a tool for advocacy, as in fix this crack in the sidewalk that catches my white cane!

I was surprised and delighted with the both the book and the photos. So much of taking great pictures is seeing things from a new perspective, and I learned that that's definitely in the cards when blind students take pictures.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Blind Awareness January 20, 2009

By cedc

Format:Hardcover

For some time now I've had a theory that photography is not about the sense of sight but rather the sense of awareness. Good photography is not about rules and technical know-how, good photography is about revealing hidden truths and realities, relationships between subject and photographer and viewer. Twenty-twenty vision may help you make beautiful images but without a sense of awareness the images will be just that, pretty. They will be shallow, devoid of truths and feelings and worst of all, without a story.

When you read "Seeing Beyond Sight: Photographs by Blind Teenagers" or visit the web site ([...]) you can't help but question the need for sight to make photographs. The author Tony Deifell explains that while the young photographers may not be able to see light they can feel the heat due to the light. They are aware of it's presence.

"I was thinking that it would be sort of hard for a blind person to take pictures, but it's not very hard. You've just got to listen." (John V., student, page 48 of Seeing Beyond Sight).

The photographs taken by these young people tell a story about their relationships between themselves and the world and their connection to it. They help us connect the inside to the outside and that is a powerful message. I've often questioned the difficulty of determining where we end and where the outside world begins. After looking at these photographs you get the feeling that there is no separation.

For me, these young photographers have proven my theory and taken it beyond the original premise. Photography is not about the sense of sight, it's beyond sight, it's about what we are, it's about being, it's about awareness... It's about being awareness itself.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Touching and Beautiful January 10, 2008

By ahashem

Format:Hardcover

I saw this book at a design conference I went to. It brought tears to my eyes. The images are powerful and the stories about the students are moving. One reason the book moved me so much is I am an artist who is at high risk of one day going blind. I always feared that going blind would end my career as a photographer and designer. This book made me rethink my roll as an artist and it encouraged me not to fear going blind. Plus I gave the book to my mom who is legally blind for Christmas. She pointed at a few of the pictures and said "That is how I see. I can't believe it. This is the most amazing gift." It is inspiring and beautiful. I have never come across a book that has spoke so dearly to my own experience. I am so grateful that I stumbled across this treasure.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving and Imagistic June 12, 2007

By M

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a wonderful book. It's remarkable simply as a collection of photographs by students who have little or no vision, since the shots are fascinating and sometimes quite profound. But the images coupled with what the young photograhers have to say about their work makes is one of the more moving photography books I've ever come across.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Learning to See from the Blind January 19, 2009

By Andrew Ilachinski

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Fine-art photography is first-and-foremost a visual language by which otherwise hidden truths and meanings - of the world and self - are revealed by the observer / artist. As such, it is rarely the case that what a photograph shows on its surface is the complete "message" that the photographer wishes to communicate. Indeed, philosophically speaking, one can say that fine-art photographers use images to provide glimpses of a reality that lies behind (and beyond) what the images represent, as things in themselves. Just as letters and words provide the basic units of grammar for literary artists to communicate essential truths that have nothing to do with letters and words, so too does light and form provide the visual grammar by which photographers reveal fundamental truths of nature (and our relationship with it) that have nothing to do with light and form. Art transforms the abject banality of sterile rules, internalized through years of rote memorization and practice, into an intimate expression of the ineffable.

So it should come as no great surprise (though, undoubtedly it will) that the blind - yes, the blind (!) - have much to teach those of us who are sighted about what real "sight" means. Seeing Beyond Sight is a truly extraordinary book, lovingly put together by visual artist, Tony Deifell. The book collects the works of visually impaired children during a five-year program of teaching photography to students at Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, North Carolina, from 1992 to 1997. The book has a dedicated website; and a recent interview with the author has recently been posted on YouTube. (There is a similar, but unrelated, book about photography by visually impaired photographers, called Shooting Blind, published by Aperture.)

Mr.... Deifell quickly addresses the most obvious question: "How can you teach photography to the blind?" On a practical level, even though most of the students involved could not see light, all of them were able to feel the heat due to light. Moreover, blindness does not preclude a technical understanding of how a camera works, and the rudiments of good imaging technique. The more difficult question to answer - and what the book so beautifully explains - is "How can the blind take pictures?" In a conventional sense, of course, they cannot; if by "taking pictures" we mean using the camera to record what they see visually. But that is not what the purest form of photography depends on.

Alfred Steiglitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Minor White - among many other great "photographic seers" - teach us that the finest photography occurs when we are able to (recognize and) capture that special sliver of time during which the boundary between inner and outer experiences vanishes. Steiglitz called such photographs equivalents; Cartier-Bresson referred to the sliver of time as the decisive moment; and Minor White talked often of the profound role that spirit plays in photography:
"Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence." - Minor White (1908 - 1976)

But whatever one chooses to call it, the underlying process - for the photographer - is always the same: the camera is merely a mechanical device (and certainly not the only such mechanical device, nor even necessarily the best one to use for this purpose!) that serves to focus our attention (to pressing the shutter) at precisely the right moment when our inner and external experiences align.

"I was thinking that it would be sort of hard for a blind person to take pictures, but it's not very hard. You've just got to listen." (John V., student, quoted on page 48 of Seeing Beyond Sight).

When the "feel is right - when everything is in its place, all the compositional elements have found their positions, the shadows and forms are just where they all must be, and when, for the blind, the warmth of the sunlight on the wall is just so, the wind has quieted down, and is no longer heard, the reverberations of distant footsteps are no longer felt, and the texture of the floor is just the right mix of smooth and rugged against the palm of our hand, then we hit the shutter.

In truth, the sighted photographer responds no more to purely visual stimuli than does the blind photographer. All photographers, whether they do so consciously or not (and whether they are aware of it or not) depend on all of their senses to reach that wonderful instant when the shutter goes "click." One can argue that blind photographers, precisely because they do not respond directly to visual stimuli, are actually closer to the core truths and realities that lie beyond the light than photographers who must work their way through to truth (by brute force, so to speak).

Just as I consider color a "distraction" to the purity of forms and tonalities I try to reveal with my black and white photographs, I can see how light itself can be a distraction if what I am really after is illumination of what light reveals to me (but which I cannot take a picture of directly). It is a great irony - paradox even (!) - of photography that it so deeply but mechanically depends on something (i.e., light) that is, in fact, rarely the focus of its intended message. Even if the light itself is the message (as exemplified by, say, Galen Rowell's lifelong artistic pursuits), the photograph can only capture the effect that light has on whatever environment the photographer has selected to take a picture in, not the light in situ.

There is a touching - or, better, an illuminating - story about a blind student named Leuwynda, who captured a series of wonderful "abstract" photos of cracks in the sidewalk; which she clearly "saw" with her walking cane but which most people are oblivious to. She used her photographs as documentary "proof" of the danger that blind students face in what most would consider uneventfully "short walks" to class, and sent her images along with a letter containing a plea for help to the superintendent. Mr. Deifell muses, on behalf of the rest of us "sighted" photographers, about how many "cracks" there are in the world that we are essentially all blind to?

"If the lights are off, I can see what I'm doing." (Dain, student, quoted on page 138 of Seeing Beyond Sight).
Another student, Josh, produced some soulful photographs of dark, blurry stairs that he used to communicate - via metaphor - a dream he had about being lost and wandering aimlessly in a snowstorm. Other students started using their growing collections of photographs as a means to develop otherwise under-developed communication skills. Merlett, for example, was both blind and learning disabled, and found reading and writing akin to torture. Photography provided a new - and joyous - language in which she could express herself and, as it turned out, tell all the stories she had always wanted to tell others but could not do so in a conventional way.

The book contains a short introduction by the author (and teacher), followed by a selection of student photographs organized into five sections: (1) distortion, (2) refraction, (3) reflection, (4) transparence, and (5) illuminance. It concludes with an afterward, a short FAQ, and a summary of where the students who participated in the project are today.

"How do you not cut people's heads off in a photo? Just ask the person where they are." (Frances, student, quoted on page 112 of Seeing Beyond Sight).

For me, the book (and the project on which it is based) is a revelation. Were it not for the context in which the images in this book were captured, and the accompanying stories of how individual images came to be, one would be tempted to "dismiss" many of the photographs as "amateurish" and merit-less as fine-art. And that would be sadly unfortunate; for these images go to the heart of human experience and artistic expression. They show us what lies beyond the light that illuminates what we take pictures of, and what all photographers - with and without the gift of sight - are trying to reveal with their photography.

Anybody with a decent camera can take a picture of a crack in the sidewalk - and have the image met with blank stares and mutterings of "Yeah, it's a crack in the sidewalk., so what?" It takes a blind photographer to so effortlessly use a physical symbol - i.e., a photograph of some "thing" - to represent the deeper, inner experience of how "difficult it is to walk to class" on a campus built by people who can see. By not being able to see things, the blind photographer naturally focuses on using the things that the camera is able to capture to show what else things are. And that is what the very best photography has always been about.

While I have focused mainly on the philosophical end of the spectrum in this short commentary, I would be remiss in not mentioning that I was just as struck about how powerful a general learning tool - about self, about world, about learning (!) - the project was for the students involved. In some ways, though not quite as "obviously" dramatic - the results of the project remind me of Oliver Sacks' Awakenings (though here the "awakenings" are more spiritual than physical).

The blind obviously have much to teach us sighted photographers how to really see. They teach us to pay attention to all of the little "invisible cracks" in the world, and to do so not necessarily solely with our eyes. There is no better place to begin the first lesson on this journey of illumination than to savor the examples in this magnificent book, Seeing Beyond Sight. Highly recommended. Read more ›