Seeing Beyond Sight: Photographs by Blind Teenagers by Tony Deifell, featuring a foreword by Robert Coles, is a one-of-a-kind book of black-and-white photography by students of the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in North Carolina. Educator Tony Deifell taught his students photography as an innovative means of self-expression. This ambitious, seemingly paradoxical premise produced intuitive photographs that are surprising, moving, and beautiful. Complementing the images are the students' own explanations of what the process and images mean to them. Deifell's own thoughtful, sensitive text adds further dimension.
An unobtrusive symbol by each photo lets readers know the photographer’s level of vision. Some of the students have low vision, some can see shape and shadow, and some have no vision at all. There is no difference in photo quality, except that the blind students have a more intuitive method and sometimes miss the subject. But what the camera reveals is always interesting.
Seeing Beyond Sight is remarkable simply as a collection by low- or no-vision teenagers, since the shots are always fascinating and often quite profound. Coupled with the students’ personal thoughts, this is one of the more moving photography books in print today. The images are a window into the perspective of a teenager with visual disabilities—a perspective at once jarringly familiar and unfamiliar, astoundingly complex and heartbreakingly simple. They remind viewers that seeing is a way of engagement with the world, but that at the same time, perception is so much more than sight.
So much of great photography is seeing things from a new perspective. Seeing Beyond Sight is a rare book of visual art and an educational resource that speaks with inspirational power, not only to the visually impaired community, but to anyone who has ever considered what it means to see.
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Publish date: April 16, 2007
152 pages
ISBN-10: 0811853497
ISBN-13: 978-0811853491
