Photos Challenge Idea of What It Means to See
Jackson Hole News & Guide, March 28, 2007
The latest art exhibit at the Teton County Library sounds like a contradiction in terms. “Shooting Blind: Photographs by the Visually Impaired” features two dozen photos taken by artists who can’t see well, or at all.
On display through May 11 at the library’s Exhibit Gallery, the free exhibit captures the unique visions of members of a New York City art collective called Seeing with Photography. The collective was started by sighted artist, Mark Andres, who has been teaching photography to visually impaired people since 1985.
On Friday, two members of the Seeing with Photography collective will join Andres to talk about their work and give a demonstration. Sonia Soberats is completely blind; Steven Erra’s sight is limited to an extreme form of tunnel vision. The three artists will discuss their personal approach to photography as well as how the collective works. The presentation is at 7 p.m. on Friday in the library’s Ordway Auditorium. The talk will be preceded by a reception at 6:30 p.m. The presentation and reception are free and open to all ages.
“I’ve learned that everyone sees differently,” Andres said. The Brooklyn based artist guides the collective in a photo-making technique that allows the artists to create their images slowly, piecing fragments together to make a whole.
Using large 4-by-5-view cameras—the kind of lumbering, early 1900s camera used by photographers ducking beneath a cloth that you’ve probably seen in films—the artist and several technicians work together to set up a shot in a darkened room. The camera’s shutter is disabled, and small flashlights are used to illuminate parts of the image, one after another.
“When the light hits the subject, it starts making an image,” Andres said. Everywhere else is dark, so only the lit part of the subject is captured on film. This traditional technique is called chronophotography or “painting with light.”
The artists work with several assistants who talk them through the image being created to make sure it is the image the artist intends.
“There’s a lot of talk while pictures are being made,” Andres said. “You have to be open, less judgmental. You have to carefully describe the photo and what you are feeling from it.” The results often have a dreamlike or underwater quality, as if light were dancing off the surface of a pool, beneath which sits the subject. One particularly striking self-portrait by Morty King features King wrapped in a white cloth moving his hands as if he were feeling music in the air. His eyes are closed, and the look on his face is calm and deep.
Exhibit coordinator Kirsten Corbett said some people she has talked to have found the photos unsettling. Corbett said the exhibit prompted her to re-examine the meaning of sight. “What does vision mean to different people?” she asked. “What kind of artwork would people with different sighted abilities produce?”
Indeed, some of the photos are an attempt to show what an individual’s vision is like. How I See by Roseann Kahn shows the artist with her face nearly blurred out by a cloudy white light. The picture is consistent with how Kahn described her sight in a book that accompanies the exhibit. “I can’t see your face or my face but I can see everything else,” she writes.
Andres, whose parents are both artists and who describes himself as “very visual,” says he no longer finds the thought of going blind to be scary.
“I have a different sense of it now,” he said. “You just use your other senses. You don’t lose essential experience.”
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