Experience photography from blindness. A workshop "to look and create pictures"

Abstract

This projects aims to bring photography to visually impaired people, namely, members of ONCE (Spanish National Organisation for the Blind). This experience consists in the design of a photography workshop involving reading and creating pictures as an integrated approach towards visual understanding.

The relationship between photography and blindness raises questions that highlight the difficulty of overcoming certain culturally understood concepts. Studying the meaning of blindness helps us to understand the close connections that exist between what we perceive and what we think. After analysing a number of photography projects created by blind artists, we recognise that there are other ways of creating pictures that enrich our way of conceiving photography. Through the analysis of these projects we demarcate three general stages in the creative process of photography from blindness, which will help us to design our workshop.

This workshop defines guidelines for a didactic approach to understanding photography by blind people. This experience demonstrates the importance of understanding an image through a creative process. By sequencing the practice of photography based on blind people’s dominion and control, we are generating confidence in their own abilities to create pictures.