Customer Reviews

Seeing Beyond Sight: Photographs by Blind Teenagers

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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.

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.

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 (http://www.seeingbeyondsight.org/) 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.

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.

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.

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.

(Below is an essay I wrote for my friend and bowling buddy Andy Ilachinski's blog ([...]). Mr. Deifell commented on my own blog that he would like to see this essay here. So, I am happy to post it here as well.)

It's an interesting, no, fascinating discovery that blind people can take such pictures. That they know of cracks in the sidewalk, where people's heads are, and how to photograph, are amazing feats. It is truly wondrous and miraculous.

Or is it?

Is it so hard to believe that the blind can take beautiful pictures? Perhaps. But, may be not. Let's explore our senses and see what we might find.

There is a current view in physics that the universe is a computer. This view holds that information is conserved and that it cannot be destroyed. What is information? Well, let us posit that information is a description of the universe, or of a part of that universe that we are experiencing at a specific place and time. There may be more to it, but clearly this is part of information of the universe.

We experience the universe through our senses: seeing, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Instead of calling them senses, let's call them sensors. Our sensors don't so much sense the universe as they measure the universe. When we drink tea, our mouths measure the temperature, either hot tea or ice tea. Our taste buds measure the sweetness. When we look we measure objects in our view for shape, color, and position relative to other objects in our field of view. Thus, seeing is really an act of measuring. Some of our senses have a higher resolution than others; we can hear a wide range of amplitudes, see an extremely diverse set of colors, but we cannot discern different tastes so well.

From our measurements we derive a sense of our universe. How do we derive that sense? Our brain. Our own internal, massively connected, computer. Our brains take measurements from our sensors and use those measurements to make sense of our universe. Our brains integrate our sight with our hearing, with our smell, with every sensor we have to describe our world.

For example, we can easily recognize smoke in the kitchen from a pot that's on fire. We see the flames, see the smoke, hear the crackle, and smell the burn and feel the heat. We know where we are and our brains deduce a pot on fire.

Are our senses limited? In a way, yes, they measure one thing such as sound with our hearing. But that is not a true limitation. Consider a bat. Bats, as you know, emit sound, listen for reflections (echoes) and their brains are able to "see" and easily navigate in the dark of night. Thus hearing can be seeing.

Consider next: sonar. Ships send sound waves through the ocean and from these sound waves computers can print maps of the ocean floor. From sounds come pictures. One sensor can be used to produce what another type of sensor would produce. The trick, the key, is the processing.

Or, if you like, consider radar. A plane sends electromagnetic radiation to the ground and with special processing, that radiation is transformed to a picture of the ground complete with buildings, foliage, cars, and other objects present. It's not sight, it's radar and it's call SAR: Synthetic Aperture Radar.

With those ideas in mind, let's consider this book. The blind taking pictures. Far fetched? I should think not. Inside each of these creative and inventive people is a brain, a processor. This processor can take all sorts of measurements and with the proper program, call it training, give the user (that person) a sense of his surroundings. Hence, the beautiful story of the girl who "sees" cracks in the sidewalk with her stick. Her vision fails her but her brain is undeterred and processes measurements of touch to give her a sense of the ground beneath her feet.

Our bodies are fascinating and marvelous.

What can we learn from this beyond the lovely pictures and, possibly, what more one can do with a camera? I am no great photographer like my bowling buddy. However, I submit we all can learn to use our sensors in new ways that we are not now trained to do. And with that we can draw new beauty, and new visions, from the universe around us.

A student of mine made a presentation about this book in my class last year and based on his recommendation (thanks, Duane) I ordered a copy.

The students in the book, from Governor Morehead School for the Blind in North Carolina, have a wide range of visual difficulties, and an unobtrusive logo-like emblem lets us know the disability level of the photographer in question. Some of them have low vision, some can see lights, shapes and shadows, others have no vision at all. I couldn't really tell a difference in the quality of these photos, except that the totally blind students had a more intuitive point and shoot method and sometimes they missed the ostensible subject--though what the camera revealed is usually quite interesting. It's hard to say how many Deifell and company culled to make this brief assemblage, but many of the photos here are wrenching either on a Walker Evans-documentary level or because we are seeing life the way teens do, as a pageant of absolute fact and absolute fantasy both at the same time.

I wasn't sure either that the black and white format allowed for enough scope. Next time around perhaps, we'd enjoy seeing some color work by this talented group of young artists.