Sight Unseen, the first major exhibition of work by the world’s most accomplished blind photographers, explores the idea that blind photographers can see in ways that sighted people cannot.
Many of us, with sight leading as our dominant sense, use images to build our world. Visual information is practical to our survival and yet it has become pervasive in our world. We respond to visual overload by shuttering and narrowing our perception, a form of self-inflicted blindness, so as to rebalance our senses. But for the sight-impaired artists in this exhibition, the act of making a photograph has provided new ways of seeing.
These artists employ diverse strategies in their work. Some use the camera to present their own inner visions. Some capture the outside world unfiltered with a non-retinal photography of chance. And a number of the artists, legally blind but retaining a limited, highly attenuated sight, photograph to capture the outside world and bring it into their realm.
In his novel Blindness, José Saramago writes, "Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are." Beethoven composed music without the ability to hear, blind Milton and Homer conjured the landscapes of the heavens and the underworld, and the artists of Sight Unseen further explore our definitions of blindness and challenge us to reevaluate what it means to see.
Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists is curated by Douglas McCulloh and was originated by UCR/California Museum of Photography, an affiliate institution of ARTSblock, the University of California, Riverside, and toured by Curatorial Assistance, Pasadena, California.
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