Seeing Beyond Sight Photographs by Blind Teenagers

For five years Tony Deifell taught teenagers to take photographs. The students were blind. Unusual asthe idea may seem at first, putting cameras in the hands of visually impaired children proved to beextremely fruitful-both for the photographers, who found an astonishing new means of self-expression, and for the viewers of their images, for whom this is an entirely new kind of dreamlike and intuitivecreation. Even before you know that these pictures were taken by the blind, they are striking for theiruse of light and composition, and haunting in their chiaroscuro intensity. The photos are accompaniedby in-depth text explaining the origins of the "Sound Shadows" program, and detailing how the childrenwere taught to take photographs. Accompanying the images are the students' own words andcaptions-in which we see how much the taking of pictures came to mean to them and the creativeprocess at work in ways rarely experienced. This is a volume that speaks with rare inspirational powerto aficionados of photography, the disabled community at large, as well as to the general reader. Abook of visual art created by those who have limited or no sight Seeing Beyond Sight documents aprogram whose ambitious, seemingly contradictory premise le to new avenues of creative expressionfor these students. Seeing Beyond Sight demonstrates countless new ways for all of us to think aboutvision, art, and perception, and what it means to see.

Tony Deifell is a San Francisco-based visual artist and social entrepreneur. He taught photography for five years at a school for the blind in Raleigh, North Carolina.