Nothing Peripheral: A Sight Impaired Artist: Braille Theory

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Braille Theory

Procedural thinking ends. Bland and plastic-like, braille's surface can receive an unintended use.
Using braille paper is nothing new in my art work. I can't decipher the bumps, and that's fine. I did learn half the alphabet and some short words but never resumed my braille lessons. Standard concept ..."bumps" -useful, "flat surface" -useless. I beg to differ.

There was in the community room of the Associated Blind Service Organization, a table filled with unwanted items left for those to pick over. I picked up two braille books- a Playboy and Sports Illustrated -around 1993- just for use as art materials. Those pages, used occasionally, stay in a box with my art supplies.

Here, braille is used to symbolize feeling. Mourning and grief. The intangible loss. I had just lost many very close friends and my sister to AIDS. Many early braille images were made with the pain and urgency of early death in mind, I reasoned braille had the dual role as a metaphor for sight loss, and non existence. One of these works shown on this blog uses linear figures inspired from Greek "white -ground "drawing made on small ceramic funeral jars which were buried with the deceased person. A departure or embarkation to the underworld is shown. One might see many patches. This is intended. Think of these as "paintings of paintings". This is an ancient archaic theme- worn and broken with time, pieces crack off, are worn away- nothing is all too clear. What makes life meaningful is its finite nature.

The narrower piece reflects another dramatic moment, presented as a flat, fragmented ancient fresco painting crowned by a Medusa head. The imagery is derived from a remarkably rare painted plaque on marble found in the excavations of Herculaneum, blistered and broken by the fury of its volcanic burial.

Yet another variation of the braille symbolism is just to reproduce the dot alphabet (or its appearance anyway). Patches and clusters of dot text play around, drawn in, illustrating - labeling or translating.

I've shown several acrylic paintings on braille paper in an exhibition in a group show by the National Exhibitions by Blind Artists around 1994.

Another brailled sketch can be seen in the light painting "Dale Cannedy Boxing a Brailed Bird". This pastel on braille paper was projected behind Dale during the exposure.

The idea to use braille in the "Box portrait" images we make at Seeing With Photography Collective, came after seeing a box portrait image Donald Martinez had made, where one could (or some could), see tiny pin pricks scattered around the image, left by the thumb tacks used to fasten the photo paper up to the box.
So that triggered a new direction, and I thought over the possibilities of merging the camera's image with some surprising materials. And so, one morning I brought in a selection of papers from my supplies at home- thin rice paper, marbled "banana paper" from Mexico, braille paper and watercolor paper too. Even a small piece of an unusual paper embedded with thin strands of vegetation, it can be seen if you look closely in Jacques Montel's box portrait. {Its in a previous post here 9.11.2010}. I used that braille sheet for a short time, but lost it, so I had to use another sheet from another braille Playboy kept in the cabinets of props in the room where we work.

Other designed and patterned objects soon followed, placed at the back, at the focus point of the box camera's crude lens,. like the round tin top in Vicki's portrait. The round lid's filigree at the periphery is seen. In the center is taped another crudely torn circle of that braille, capturing Vicki's soft likeness.

Above, Braille 3,1993, Braille 2, 1993, Untitled, c. 1993, Blind at the Table c. 2006, Dale Cannedy Boxing a Brailled Bird, c. 2000, Braille Eye, 2004, Excavated Fresco, 2002, Brailled Columns, c.2006, Braille Self Portrait as Antique, 2008, Victorine's Image on a Braille Tondo, Soon After Singing "All You Need is Love', 2009.

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Welcome

"Nothing Peripheral" is essentially an art blog, a journal of images and wotds shuffling back and forth in time. I'm not dutiful to regular or timely posting so, there are kind of large gaps, but whenever I make imagery I just have to show, it'll get here.

Many light paintings are on these pages as well as some writing. Since most of my work now is created using the "light painting" technique of photography a quick definition can explain the photographs you see. A light painting is a long exposure photo putting the camera on a sturdy tripod and in a very dark room or other space. The shutter is left open and the photographer uses a flashlight to paint their subject over a lengthy time period.

Visual artists who have very diminished sight or who are totally blind, are expanding the rich and varied facets of art even further now and I'm fortunate to be a part.

Since so much of my work now is created using the light painting technique, a quick definition could be helpful. Basically a camera is on a steady tripod and in a very dark room or space the shutter is left open and the artists subject is painted with the light shining from a flashlight.

I began light painting in 1997 with the Seeing With Photography Collective here in New Yprk City.

Contact me eonradius@yahoo.com

At the Light Painting World Alliance websites, you'll find the phrase “Night is Canvas” . Night is no ordinary word for me, I suffer from night blindness. It's a powerful, often frightening word, separating me from the able bodied, putting me in the folder labelled "Unable"- legally blind, asking for help to cross the street. Night, and its draining, light-less hardships, needn’t be only that. After all, the other part, “canvas” is what matters more in the end.

I belong to a group of photographers based in New York City called the seeing With photography Collective. Many in our art group are blind or sight impaired, like myself. We create and exhibit light paintings.

The very nature of our visual limitations can provoke any viewer or perceiver of these images...Is less, more? What is seeing?

Night is often our permanent reality too, as sightless people. I myself am nearly blind, but see a little too, now and then, so I stand in two realms. Every cast shadow, each building entrance, robs me of sight.

I'm desperate for light really, any light, any scrap of stray, ineffectual photon, I feel the desperation -my dying retinas ravenous to see, like an emaciated, skeletal dog will gnaw and scour the air off the alley.

From the context of blindness, the word “ light” glows with particular, symbolism beyond its physical nature. It glows with reflected and diming echoes morphing with sighs and regrets at its intolerable loss, its hopes, its whispered paradises....of incandescent agility and certainty. Light's abandonment lingers like afterglow, we swallow hard, loosing spectacle, comparison, choice and pleasure.

To speak of light, we speak of its opposite nature too, embedded and not apparent. A dual part barely recognized, yet always there lurking, frowning and nodding within - the dark.

Our group originated from a photography class for blind and sight impaired students. Mark Andres, our teacher, taught us the technique of light painting in 1997. Mark was interested to learn what we would make of the technique as it involves using the mind in a place where we all were equally in the dark. It wasn’t about capturing a decisive moment, as much as constructing something. There was resonance with the technique, and we as a group, haven't put down our flashlights yet.

There are a variety of people who shoot light paintings but can't see. Some have little background in photography or any visual art media, some enjoyed photography for the usual reasons before loosing their eyesight. Others were actively involved in serious image making for a very long time, and found there an artistic outlet to explore.

Some in our group see nothing, though many have some remaining, but minimal vision. A few see well, even what's termed “normally”.

When I was told there was an actual photography class for blind and sight impaired students back in 1993, I remember I was surprised, a little sceptical, but beaming with happiness because others had understood that making visual art and not seeing were not mutually exclusive. I felt like a connection was made between two threads that had been re- attached. Two electric wires that needed to join, finally did in that bland basement classroom at the VISIONS Blind Services Organization, where we work.

At first it sounds improbable, but just at first. Like some new rhythm, some unfamiliar but absorbing thing.

Memories play a part in our group's imagery, but they aren’t the sole theme by any means.

Sunshine and faces, that funny red chair, costumes, picnics and monsters, movies and night clubs, cartoons and sports events, ancient frescoes and scary subway rides, and countless other memories of the world of light, all reform before our flashlights.

Despite sight loss we all have memory and ideas to explore in our mind's eye long after our biological eyes give up on the act and art of looking.

We re- create them again, different maybe, not duplicates, not snapshots, but works that bring out that memory or theme with the perspectives all shifted, energized, sparkling.

The light painter's dark frame invites all photographers to come and illuminate. I think it must be hard for any photographer to resist the urge to try one given the chance. Its darkness is very familiar territory, our default color, our resigned dark velvet blindfold that we can't tear away. We run our hands around the frameed out scene, through the central spaces, feeling fringes and walls,,touching whats on the other side of the camera’s viewAnd shine our little flashlights on that night canvas, painting with light...quivering fabrics shaken and moved around firey beings amid Interstellar jewels.

The light paintings aren't made quickly, they take a few minutes and our models shift a little, droop a little over time. The laughs ensue at the results, three eyes, squashed noses, pinheads, people morphed into squat statuettes and ghostly elfs.

Mostly its a collaborative effort when we work, but more experienced artists can work independently too. And focusing? That’s done by a sighted assistant but does a film director focus their own motion picture cameras? The minor things like focusing are a different story from the major things like ideas, composition and lighting, that are done by the sightless, sighted, or sight impaired photographer.

None of this is surprising of course, as a visual artist I understand it.

The blind photographers will also direct where each person, object or background area is, and how all should be positioned, so again, the creative control is left to the photographer, the sighted assistant just letting them know things like what's in, or not in the camera's frame.

There's struggle, there's the battle against the dark. I sense this in our work, but, maybe it’s my own internal projection. We light-less, enact on some level, a very core, very primal encounter that's a universal archetype - the struggle of light over dark. It's mainly subconscious and maybe not fully realized, even by we who make the work,. Archetypes can work well as form, as far as art goes, I think.

And there's defiance in that frame too - the flashlight as weapon in this effort, this determination to hold on, and not go quietly into the darkness.

Some have said our imagery can be nightmarish or sad, and that's sometimes so.

Yet there's an enorous variety of themes and styles found among our member's work, fashionable runway stylizations, Biblical tableaux, happy partying and old Master re-enactments are all here, cheerfully hued, non angst- ridden enough to be hung comfortably above a living room sofa.

Comparing our group's work with other light paintings, I see a difference but I’m not sure what it is. I don't see us as being fixated on pretty lights or special effects, just for the sake of prettiness or coolness that you forget a minute later. They seem simpler, but still visually nuanced and raw simultaneously.

We sometimes teach workshops and I recall some photographers who had a difficult time letting go of their light meter mind -set, and stared at me in sceptical disapproval when I said the timing was a matter of experience. It was sort of fun being a guy with a white blind cane walking into things, and giving lessons on how to make photographs. You get used to these sorts of things really.

In a way taking images with out seeing is a significant reorganization of expectations.

A blindfold can work great as a teaching tool. We use them with the sighted students. Many really are thrilled to be blindfolded, and smile, and grope around, saying “Wow” and getting goose -bumps feeling things, and just delving into their other senses that are mainly ignored in the photography studio. But other photographers have quite a hard time letting go.

By deliberately shutting out light itself, and briefly inviting in the harrowing, dreadful fear of any visual artist, blindfolding touches on certain elements of psychology and creativity that are good to be aware of.

Donald Martinez, a sighted member of our collective, sometimes closes his eyes when he makes a light painting, to distance himself further from the tightness, the crispness and control, the domination of light upon the mind.

Human nature doesn't want to relinquish feedback from our efforts, our ears from our music, our taste from our cooking, yet some can never have the full visual assessment of their work that eyes provide.

How does the blind photographer know what they have made? Those who can see describe, and become the eyes ...providing the scope, the tone, and narrative that will form the structure of the new creation, glowing unseen on the camera's digital screen and glowing too in a different way, in the internal mind of the unseeing artist.

Lately the work of blind and sight impaired visual artists is becoming more widely known. It’s a new facet in the cultural legacy of art.

What do we have to offer the world of light? Maybe we can act as a sort of mirror. One that reflects your views, maybe shifting and nudging cozy presumptions.

I've no confident theory to pre

sent on the nature of blind photography. For me, and many in the Seeing With Photography Collective, it’s an experience to be lived, dim and flickering sometimes, loud and warm at others.

Without light... voices take on an expansive, rich meaning. Ideas loom more directly. There's less distraction by visual clutter. Working in the dark with my group causes me no gut-churning dread, no dizzying loss.

Something memorable happens creating imagery in the dark, with the dark, the dark as our supportive friend, all of us sighted or blind together, thinking, trying, laughing, describing, listening...weaving something.

Light is essentially indifferent, angled into the lens of an eye or cold camera, we give it meaning and arrange its context. In the intertwining of sighted and not sighted, one thread describing another, eventually we all must close our eyes in sleep, lightless sighted and blind alike, and all our dreaming eyes understand and gaze, and see.

IGHT IS CANVAS

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Braille Theory

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