A little while ago, I was checking out a very nice blog called electro^plankton and found this piece on a subject that I’d never thought about or even thought possible - blind photographers.

It features three visually impaired photographers - including Bruce Hall, a legally blind nature photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian - talking about their working processes and how vision influences their photos.

That got me thinking about the other side of photography - viewing - and how images could be communicated to blind readers. I was hoping to find some sort of parallel universe of picture books for the visually impaired, but it didn’t really pan out that way. But I did find two really cool examples that I think are worth mentioning.

In January, NASA released “Touch the Invisible Sky” - a 60-page book with color images of nebulae, stars, galaxies and some of the telescopes that captured them. The big challenge, of course, is how to translate a 2D technicolor image into a tactile system meant for language. The most detailed explanation I could find is this, from the book’s press release:

Each image is embossed with lines, bumps, and other textures. The raised patterns translate colors, shapes, and other intricate details of the cosmic objects, allowing visually impaired people to experience them.

Here’s the cover, which shows some of the texture:

And here’s a short clip on Noreen Grice, one of the book’s authors and a leader in the movement to make astronomy accessible to the visually impaired. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say she’s probably also a Red Sox fan. Salute!

NASA’s site has a couple of interviews with blind readers of the book, and one of the things they point out is the subjectivity of all impressions of scientific phenomena. You read your text book and see a bunch of wavy lines and clusters of dots and think “Right. That’s what an electromagnetic field looks like.” But as one of the readers points out, “On page 4 is a depiction of all the wavelengths of the electro-magnetic spectrum, from radio to gamma-rays. It shows, in a way, that all humans are partially blind. No one can see gamma-rays! Yet the cosmos is bright and lively in these ‘invisible’ wavelengths.”

So the second, much lighter find I made was this:

Apparently from 1970-1985 Playboy, the most sought-after photography magazine among heterosexual boys aged 11-14 (the age before they learn of Hustler and Swank), published a monthly edition in Braille, with funding from the Library of Congress, under the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. According to a story in the New York Times, in December of ‘85 the US Congress - in a foreshadowing of the ideological cock blocking to come - withheld the funds to print the run of 1000 that Playboy had been maintaining. That’s the last thing I could find, apart from this pretty dumb post , from which this very beautiful photo is taken.

I’d love to know more if anybody has heard anything on the subject….

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