Visual Art by Artists who are Visually Impaired and Blind

The Reciprocal Gaze in The View From Here

Christine Ellen Leahey

Guest Curator, The View From Here: Visual Art by Artists who are Visually Impaired and Blind

Director of Visitor Services, Santa Monica Museum of Art

The View From Here: Visual Art by Artists who are Visually Impaired and Blind is an exhibition that offers a reciprocal gaze between sighted viewers and six California based artists who have varying age-onsets and types of blindness. Ranging from legally blind to totally and congenitally blind, the artists work in all media. They have total ownership of their independent, creative process. They demonstrate formal principles of art thought to be limited to sight, such as perspective, occlusion, and the ability to translate such concepts onto a two-dimensional surface. The discordance between their compromised visual acuity and the assuredness of their renderings is phenomenal, but when blindness is recognized as a spectrum of vision loss, the concept of a blind visual artist seems less of an anomaly. The art in this exhibition is perhaps the most authentic notion of how someone who is visually impaired or blind sees because the first person narratives are told through visual means, rather than the mediating tool of language or, as described below, the insensitive portrayals and misappropriation of work by sighted artists.

In the late 1980s, French photographer Sophie Calle took portraits of people who are congenitally blind and portraits of what each person defined as a thing of beauty. She articulated the concept of Les Aveugles, which translates as “The Blind,” with a redundant comment on the absence of vision, “I met people who were born blind. Who had never seen. I asked them what their image of beauty was.” Joseph Grigley, an artist who is deaf, responded with a rhetorical question from the perspective of the portrait sitter. He writes, “I am arrested by the fact that these images do not, because of their visual modality, return themselves to the blind. Since your face is not available to me, why should my face be available to you?”1 Grigley is uncomfortable because he feels implicated in the objectification of these people who are blind. He is as bothered by the want of a reciprocal gaze as he imagined they would be.

In July 2003 neurologist Oliver Sacks’ essay on blindness in The New York Weekly was illustrated with a photograph that also precludes a reciprocal gaze. The photograph pictures men and women, each oriented in subtly different directions. Soft focus, the grainy effect of development with a mixed media overlay, and the subjects’ extremely lethargic movement, yields a blurry image. Several compositional features elicit viewer projection into the picture plane: The camera is angled from a slightly aerial vantage point; each figure is depicted from the rear; the foremost figures are cropped above the feet such that they occupy the viewer’s space and resist being grounded by the photograph’s edge; and the vertex of the image is a gaping void at center bottom rather than a vanishing point. Everyone in the photograph wears black and, more morose, there is no reciprocal gaze among the subjects, nor between the subjects and the viewer. One reader remarked that they “look like they are dead.”3 This observation is significant because blindness is a historical and biblical metaphor for death, often depicted through negative stereotypes of the condition and coupled with horrific violence. The photograph precedes anecdotes about mental imagery by people with vision loss. It also comes before Sacks’ revelation that there is no typical experience of blindness. Rather than underscore his thesis about the interdependence of perceptual modes, the photograph is an immediate pictorialization of the article’s subtitle “what the blind see.” This haunting image resonates with Grigley’s lament, “Since your face is not available to me, why should my face be available to you?”

The want of a reciprocal gaze exists because the questions posed are about how the “mind’s eye” compensates for vision loss, rather than about the nature of vision itself.

Blindness is not commonly understood as a spectrum of visual function because it is measured against “normalcy.” Medical definitions measure the proximity of blindness to normal sight, but provide little information vision itself.4 Defining blindness only in fixed opposition to sight implies a hierarchy. Rod Michalko, a sociologist who is blind, explains that when sight is privileged over blindness the latter experience of the world is considered private, limited, and invalid. When vision is dominant, knowledge is located in the eyes and when the eyes are impaired so, too, is knowledge. Michalko continues,

It is within this piece of local knowledge that danger lurks. Unlike some dangers which are relatively clear and evenly marked with warning signs, this one is not obvious at all and there are no warning signs posted; this is what makes it the most dangerous of all dangers. This is the danger that comes from seeing local knowledge as just that, local. The danger arises when such knowledge is understood as mere experience, and thus relevant only in and to a particular locale . . . What counts as knowledge in one locale does not in another and such local knowledge is often seen as detrimental to moving from one locale to another.5

Through mixed media sculptures and installations, conceptual artist Alison Ulman speaks to the forced localization of knowledge by the sighted world. She has traversed a course from being fully sighted, to losing central vision due to ocular histoplasmosis while earning an advanced degree in fine art, and ultimately reentering the social, economic, and cultural life of a society that misunderstands and disrespects blindness. Her artist statement bears a striking resemblance to Michalko’s contention. Ulman writes, “Being blind helps me stay awake and alive on the cusp of danger, moving boldly through the unrealized hazards of the world as threats spring out of hidden corners and snares appear before my feet.” Her construction The Lessons suggests that danger lies in the liminal statw between desiring and realizing vision. Mounted with a hinged box’s interior just above the viewer’s line of sight, with objects jutting out slightly above the container, and illuminated by power cords intertwined with barbed wires that trail down the gallery wall, the work taunts the viewer. By reclaiming the act of looking, Ulman trespasses on the concept of blindness as localized knowledge.

Jacques Derrida, a major contemporary philosopher, has written profound meditations on art and blindness. With his counter-intuitive and revolutionary deconstructivist philosophy, Derrida posits that the origin of drawing is actually localized in the experience of blindness. In Memoirs of the Blind, an exhibition catalog that accompanied his selection of images about blindness from the Louvre, Derrida analyzes of J. B. Suvee’s painting Butades or the Origin of Drawing in which a young woman traces the shadow of her lover who is departing for war. Butades does not see her because their gazes cannot meet. Derrida writes that her drawing stick is a staff of the blind, “It is as if seeing were forbidden in order to draw, as if one drew only on the condition of not seeing.”6 With its themes of truth, desire, loss, memory, and their link to the image, this allegory speaks to the paradox of art and blindness. Through semantic play, Derrida suggests that sight and blindness are complimentary, inextricable concepts. He quips that a drawing of the blind is a drawing of the blind because the act of drawing recalls only a memory of sight. The origin of drawing may be localized in blindness because sight and blindness have a common lineage and shared memory.

For artists who are totally and congenitally blind, their drawings reside only in memory once manifested on a two-dimensional surface. They do not return to the blind, as Grigley would say, but rather the tactile gaze returns to mental imagery and becomes an index of absence, an imprint for the sighted viewer alone. Blind from birth, artist Helen Fukuhara utilizes touch to navigate and represent the visual world. Her monoprints are abstract collages of various textures--such as string, lace, burlap, and hand-carved linocuts--on a single plate. They are painted and pressed several times until she has filled the entire surface. Art teachers at Braille Institute guide her color choices, but the process is otherwise solitary. Fukuhara is an experienced musician, but visual art became her expressive outlet rather late in life. Early childhood instructors did not permit her to finger-paint, but as an adult she has taken college courses in art history. Due to the pioneering scholarship of experimental psychologists such as catalog essayist Dr. Susanna Millar, education theorists now appreciate that touch informs comprehension of and representation in two-dimensions.

James Cadiz, also blind from birth, further exemplifies this notion with an untitled woodblock print of a kinetic line. The mark’s graphic quality is simple--Cadiz never lifts his stylus, he creates tension within the picture plane by gravitating towards, but never violating, its edge, and he leaves ample negative space that is analogous to the darkness from which his mental imagery emerges. Cadiz would be unable to render a meaningful image were it not for his cognizance that sight is but a mechanism for ordering the world, and that blindness permits an ordering that is nonetheless intentional and expressive.

In his catalog essay for this exhibition, psychologist John Kennedy echoes Derrida’s question of pictorial genesis when he writes that the subject demands “projection back to cave-art times to rethink our ideas about the origin and basis of pictures, and their connection to the sighted and the blind.”7 This intrigue applies to artists with all disability types because they are often unbiased by canonical definitions of what art is. Artists from the ice age era and artists who are autistic, for example, draw objects in space from unusual aerial vantage points in an economical, linear manner.8 Both attend to structure, linearity, outline, directionality, three-dimensional effect, perspective, and foreshortening. They also tend to copy from observed reality. Autistic and legally blind, artist Michael Levell is enamored with Architectural Digest. He obsessively draws and paints interiors with seductive vanishing points that are countered by sophisticated color choices that reinforce the flatness of the picture plan and repeat the circular motif of black windows. Levell is exceptional for employing an original and vibrant palette, for the assertiveness and fluidity of his stroke, and for rendering perfect scale and foreshortening in spite of working with his face flush against the canvas due to extremely limited sight. Levell is blind, but he is also non-verbal autistic and deaf. His visual perception and personal expression are thus only made known through the primary evidence of his paintings. For Levell, as for most artists who are autistic, visual structure is the picture’s central subject and carrier of meaning.

Contrary to popular belief, the camera lens need not substitute vision for artists who are legally blind, nor does the mechanism preclude expressive content. The photographers in The View From Here control lighting, composition, cropping, development and a host of other aesthetic decisions that require a keen sensitivity to visual stimuli. This is best demonstrated by the black and white photographs of urban landscapes by Michael Richard, who has congenital acute amblyopia in his left eye and compromised vision in his right eye due to resection and radiation of a tumor that had temporarily detached his retina. Richard’s photograph Double Take depicts a building-lined street that recedes into the background adjacent to an almost identical image. The photograph has a mise en scene of itself: At left the tableau is contained in a square, at right and top left is the actual scene. Richard captured a mirror and the reflection projected onto it by a mirror outside the picture plane. The photograph tricks the eye because the objects’ reflections appear directly in front of the objects themselves. The near symmetry is an optical illusion created by opposing side mirrors of a city bus on which Richard was a passenger. Four times removed, the viewer (of the photograph of a mirror reflecting the reflections of another mirror) must question the nature of vision and whether it can be trusted. Double Take is therefore the exhibition’s raison d’etre. As Walker Evans writes in his book Photography, “The blind are not totally blind. Reality is not totally real.”9

Photographers who have lost sight later in life inevitably document changes in their vision through their art. It may be as prominent as a shift in subject matter or, in this case, as subtle as employing adaptive techniques. Whereas Richard utilizes strong contrasts of natural light, Kurt Weston uses professional studio lamps to illuminate portraits that he develops himself. Before becoming legally blind due to the contradiction of two experimental treatments for AIDS related Cytomegalovirus, he led a successful career as a fashion photographer. Working outside of commercial photography has liberated Weston’s personal expression. He still works with the human figure and his portraits are now infused with a sense of mysticism and spirituality. When full frontal, the sitter delivers a penetrating, direct stare that is best characterized as equivocal, if not diffident. Weston’s most recent body of work is a series of self-portraits that artistically simulate his experience of blindness and its emotional weight. In this visual autobiography, Weston presents himself with one eye obscured by a jeweler’s loop; with his palms pressed firmly against the picture plane; and with both eyes closed. In his resistance to blindness, it is as if Weston also rejects the onlooker. The photographs are deeply moving but perhaps unintentionally, the gaze is not truly reciprocal. Grigley admonishes, “Since your face is not available to me, why should my face be available to you?”

The View From Here: Visual Art by Artists who are Visually Impaired and Blind implores the viewer to meet the gaze of artists who are blind, to reconsider the origin of drawing, and to be self-conscious of the act of looking. It is, after all, only by an awareness of vision that people, sighted or blind, may know what they see.

Works Cited

1 Grigley, J. (2000). “Postcards to Sophie Calle” in Points of Contact, Disability, Art, and Culture,

S. Crutchfield and M. Epstein (eds.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 31-58.

2 Sacks, O. (2003). “The Mind’s Eye, What the Blind See,” The New Yorker pp. 48-59.

3 Leahey, K. (2003). Personal correspondence.

4 Titchkosky, T. (2002). “Cultural Maps: Which Way to Disability?” in Disability/Postmodernity, Embodying Disability Theory, M. Corker and T. Shakespeare (eds.) London: Continuum.

5 Michalko,

6 Derrida, J. (1993). Memoirs of the Blind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

7 Kennedy, J. (2003). “The Blind Draw Right on the Edge” in The View From Here: Visual Art by Artists who are Visually Impaired and Blind.

8 Kellman, J. “Ice Age Art, Autism, and Vision: How We See/How We Draw.” Studies in Art Education pp. 117-131.

9 Evans, W. (2003). Photography.

With gratitude to our sponsors, the AT&T Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, Dr. Fred Kurata, Roger Leahey, and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, for recognizing that access to cultural knowledge is a right and not a privilege.

Special thanks to website designer Joe Cantrell, website technician Tom Bolton, photographer Roger Marchutz, executive director Elsa Longhauser and my colleagues Alexandra Pollyea and staff at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.