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- Can you feel it?
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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The pictures above are from the series “Daddy & I” by Zhang O, a photographer originally from Hunan Province, now living in New York. The series was exhibited earlier this year at Pekin Fine Arts Gallery in Beijing.
Here is an excerpt of the artist’s statement:
By photographing adopted Chinese girls and their fathers I try to capture the love between a female child and an adult male. What is the nature of this complex relationship, especially when different ethnic and cultural backgrounds are introduced? Through the relationship of the emerging feminine power of the adolescent girl to the mature father, each image explores the unfathomable relation of the two inseparable, yet often divided cultures, East and West.
On a broader level, this project reflects my interest in the change of the power relationship between East and West. I am curious about how the West sees the rapid development of contemporary China. The growing girls symbolize the future potential of China. Like the girls adapting to their new situation, China is learning from the West to grow its economy. Is its emergence from regional power to global economic force a change that will be accepted and encouraged? Or will it be seen as a rebellion against the rules that the West has established for others to follow?
Likewise, as the girls grow up, will they remain innocent adoptees under the tutelage of their Western patriarchs? Or will their progression to maturity disturb the relationship’s equilibrium?
For more of O’s work, visit her site
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- Pic of the day
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