Blind photographer” may sound like the punch line to a joke in bad taste, but rest assured—there are blind photographers, and they turn out some very impressive images. You can see many of their photographs online, and if you’ll be in Riverside, California, before August 29, you can see an exhibit of their work, titled SightUnseen, on display at the University of California Riverside/the California Museum of Photography. The museum says, “It is the first major museum exhibition on a subject rich with paradox and revelation” and “blind photographers possess the clearest vision on the planet.”
The photographs by 12 “of the most accomplished blind photographers in the world” are impressively varied. I guess I had expected the photos to be “much of a muchness,” given the common element of having been made by photographers with no, or very little, ability to see—but I was glad to learn I was wrong.
And the photographers themselves are at least as varied as their photos. Bruce Hall, for instance, is legally blind, which hasn’t stopped him from becoming an elementary school teacher or a scuba diver and underwater photographer since 1983. He often uses his photography as a kind of magnifying glass—underwater macro/close-up photography enables him to identify specific features of the plants and animals in his pictures.
Pete Eckert, on the other hand, had normal vision, and in fact was very visually oriented, trained in sculpture and industrial design. He was planning to study architecture at Yale when he started to lose his sight and learned he had retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable disease that causes its victims to gradually lose their sight until they go completely blind. “It took me to years to recover and figure out what to do.” Then, when cleaning out a drawer, he found his mother-in-law’s old camera, a 1950s Kodak. His wife described the settings to him so he could figure out how to use it. “I found the camera fascinating. . . . I was hooked.”
The SightUnseen exhibit runs in Riverside until the end of August and probably will then travel to Mexico City. The flickr photo-sharing site has many images by blind photographers, and there are several other relevant Web sites, including www.theblindphotographer.com, based in Israel.
Untitled (often called “Chair Silhouette”), 2003, from the series: Orchard Park, 2003.
There’s no question that Andy Lock’s big, all-green color prints are distinctive. They begin when he takes “normal” 35mm slides, then projects them onto a surface coated with glow-in-the-dark paint. The final step is photographing the glowing “ghost images” that remain after the projector is shut off.
“The color you see in the exhibition prints is film’s way of registering the color of the phosphorescent paint that I was using when I began projecting and re-photographing the images,” Lock explained. “It’s a fundamental and at the same time wholly coincidental element in the work.”
The photographs have a soft, pictorial quality—“a large-scale contemporary take on Pictorialism,” says the George Eastman House photography museum in Rochester, New York. (Pictorialism can be defined as “an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality”—Encyclopaedia Britannica.)
The Eastman House exhibit displays images from Lock’s 2003 Orchard Park series, documenting the vacant rooms in an apartment tower of that name after the tenants had moved out and just before the building was demolished. The pictures are a “photographic exploration of the psychological legacies of previously inhabited spaces; taking as its subject dispossessed domestic interiors and the artifacts left behind by past occupants—chairs, a bed, crumpled paper, an empty corner.”
Jerry O’Neill has been photographing, writing, and lecturing about photography for many years. His photo credits include grip-and-grin shots for the U.S. Army, photo finishes for thoroughbred race tracks, hospital operating room photographs, and snapshots of his wife and two children.
‘A sense of place’ on display
James T. Jonathan, self-portrait, approximately 1907.
For 50 years, the African American photographer James T. Johnathan photographed nearly anything and everything in the town of Bay Shore on the south shore of Long Island, New York, about 40 miles east of Manhattan. Bay Shore, founded in 1708, isn’t big—its population today is about 24,000—and it’s officially designated as a hamlet.
James T. Johnathan and his wife, Lucy, moved to Bay Shore from Harlem in 1916, and until his death in 1966, he photographed both the white and black people of the town. According to the New York Times, “He was the official photographer for the school district, for the wedding circuit, for commissioned portraits and civic events, and for his own posterity. He worked in what would now be labeled as virtual anonymity, unknown beyond his tight-knit circle of family, friends, and clients. His lack of fame and fortune did not seem to inhibit him; he was a big and unusual fish in this small pond. He thrived. It was enough.”
Now, more than 40 years after his death, the Bay Shore photographer is having his first photo exhibit, “A Sense of Place,” 50 photographs selected from the 120 held by Mr. Johnathan’s 11 remaining grandchildren. The show is curated by Walter Garcia of nearby Glen Cove, a photographer and a photography professor at Briarcliffe College, who admits to being a history buff.
“Primarily my intention was to show not just his proficiency and working method, but also to show his status in the community,” he told the Times. “He owned a lucrative photography studio for 40 years; you could also say he captured the essence of the hamlet. He photographed everyone in town, whether black or white. It was highly unusual for a black man to enjoy such entrepreneurial status in that time period, but he was evidently respected and sought out. He wasn’t treated as hired help.”
The exhibit’s venue is the original Bay Shore firehouse built more than a century ago, which has been renovated and repurposed as the Second Avenue Firehouse gallery and performance space (secondavenuefirehouse.com).
SHORT TAKES
Twelve times as many digital SLRs—will be sold this year as film-using SLRs, according to the recent Digital Imaging Survey conducted by the Photo Marketing Association. About 15 million U.S. households say they intend to purchase a camera in the next year, with 52% planning to get a digital point-and-shoot model, 24% planning to purchase a DSLR, and only a lonely 2% planning to buy a film-using SLR. (Another 16% plan to buy a camcorder.) As for digital photography accessories, the most popular were memory cards, followed by camera bags.
That famous photograph of Che Guevara—taken in 1960 by Cuban photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez (known professionally as Korda), has been used on T-shirts, watches, sneakers, key chains, cigarette lighters, coffee mugs, wallets, backpacks, mouse pads, beach towels, and even condoms. The photo is used for “branding” to sell air fresheners in Peru, snowboards in Switzerland, and wine in Italy, and supermodel Gisele Bündchen once pranced down a runway in a Che bikini. Now, there’s a book tracing the photo’s self-contradictory life: Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, by Michael Casey.
Ritz Camera closing more than 300 stores nationwide—Long considered an industry leader, Ritz Camera Centers, the largest chain of specialty camera stores in the U.S., will close more than 300 stores as part of a court-supervised bankruptcy reorganization, leaving approximately 400 Ritz Camera stores still open around the country. Retail inventory valued at more than $50 million will be liquidated at the stores being closed.
New photography “App” for iPhone to take great baby photos—to help parents get better photos of their babies, there’s a new app for Apple’s iPhone that assists by playing sounds that attract the baby’s attention—the sounds of other babies laughing and squeaky toys. The app’s description states, “Just select a sound; then iBaby Photo Pro will start your camera automatically to take a photo. As it does this, it will start playing the sounds that are designed to get your baby to look right at the camera!” More info at Apple’s App Store. n
A lament for high-quality projection—famed movie reviewer Roger Ebert pays attention to the image quality on the screen as well as the acting, and he doesn’t much like what he’s seeing lately. “It is somewhat sad [that] the majority of theatergoers will never have the opportunity to experience what film is capable of. Unless you have seen a film exhibited at one of the few well-maintained theaters still left, by projectionists who actually care about the films they are showing (and yes, they are out there), you will never know what the medium is capable of. While I still go out and ask for my money back if I have to sit through something which is truly egregious, I must admit the exercise has become old. Unfortunately, it is the only thing that theater owners will respond to.” Especially egregious is the claim made by theaters using digital projection on enlarged multiplex screens that what they are showing is IMAX.
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