Word: visioning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...would span from Rome to Budapest. Ibn Battuta, the 14th century Arab explorer, hailed the archipelago as "one of the wonders of the world." Ever since, the Maldives has enchanted shipwrecked sailors, Hollywood celebrities and Russian oligarchs fortunate enough to wash up by its shores. Yet beneath this outsiders' vision of paradise lurks a more troubled reality - one shaped by 30 years of a suffocating dictatorship that ended only last year...
...transvestites in New Orleans and Braille-enhanced black-and-whites as well as portraits, nudes, landscapes, travel shots, abstracts, collages, and everything else you might expect from a "sighted" photographer. Except the subtext and context is blindness: the photographers are legally blind, some born without sight or with limited vision, and others who have lost their vision over time. And that is why, argues the man who organized the show, they are at the very heart...
...whole trajectory of modern art for the last 100 years has been toward the concept of mental construction, and blind photography comes from that place," says the show's "sighted" curator Douglas McCulloh, himself a photographer. "They're creating that image in their head first - really elaborate, fully realized visions - and then bringing some version of that vision into the world for the rest of us to see." A sample of the photographs posted by TIME.com received a huge amount of attention. (See pictures by blind photographers here...
...participating photographer is Pete Eckert, an artist with multiple degrees in design and sculpture who only turned to photography after losing his vision in the mid-1980s. He opens the shutter on his camera and then uses flashlights, lasers, lighters, and candles to paint his scene on film. He explains: "The human brain is wired for optical input, for visualization. The optic nerve bundle is huge. Even with no input, or maybe especially with no input, the brain keeps creating images. I'm a very visual person, I just can?t see." "Sighted photographers always talk about the difficulty...
Kurt Weston's dark and depressing images - many of which are stylized self-portraits - are also a star of the show. A former fashion photographer in Chicago, Weston lost his vision due to AIDS in 1996, and focuses his lens, and sometimes simply his scanner, on images of decay and disability. "I not only want to look at these things, photograph these things, but put an exclamation point on them," he explains. "I'm saying, 'You need to look at this disabled body, this aging body. And maybe you need to reconsider your ideas about what is normal or abnormal...