SIGHT UNSEEN catalog - California Museum of Photography ...

6
III.
It is a timeless cross-cultural belief that
there is a seeing beyond sight. The artists
of this exhibition chart connections
between two worlds: outward sight versus
vision with the inner eye. “I slip photos
under the door from the world of the blind
to be viewed in the light of the sighted,”
says Pete Eckert.
I’m not inclined toward the metaphysical.
Photographers of necessity concentrate
on the tangible world. The camera
captures light reflected from objects.
There is no need to amplify this mystery
with imagined spiritual schemes. And
the photographers of Sight Unseen, for
the most part, hesitate to ascribe deep
meanings to their images. However, as
photographer Duane Michals writes,
“Photography deals exquisitely with
appearances, but nothing is what it
appears to be.” Art itself is predicated
on the idea that simple physical realities
are latent with mysteriously compound
meanings. And the literature of blindness
is full of clues and whispers hinting
that we should pay attention to these
remarkable photographs that join the
invisible and visible worlds.
Firstly, perhaps the blind are immune to
the profoundly hidden blindness that
afflicts photographers. If
the sighted are blind from
too much seeing, blind
photographers, by contrast,
are unhindered by the
disability of sight. They
approach the world free of
emersion in visual media. “I
start out at the zero point
of photography,” says Evgen
Bavcar, “I am not influenced
by other photographers
because I cannot see and
therefore I cannot be under
their influence.” Jacques
Derrida arrives at a similar
conclusion: “By a singular
vocation, the blind man
becomes a witness; he must attest to the
truth or the divine light. He is an archivist
of visibility.”
“It is a grace bestowed upon the blind,”
writes Karl Bjarnhof in his memoirs
of blindness, to have “an eye for the
unseen.” Jacques Lusseyran writes
of the heightened inner world of the
blind: “Like drugs, blindness heightens
certain sensations, giving sudden and
often disturbing sharpness to the senses
of hearing and touch. But, most of all,
like a drug, it develops inner as against
outer experience,
and sometimes to
excess. At such times
the world unfolding
before a blind person
is perilous, because
it is more consoling
than words, and has
the kind of beauty
found only in the
poems or pictures of
artists with hallucinations—artists
like
Poe, Van Gogh and
Rimbaud.”
For all of recorded
time, people have
believed that the blind possess vision
reaching beyond the physical world.
Tiresias, the blind prophet who could
see into the future, was consulted by
the full pantheon of Greek mythology.
Democritus, it is said, blinded himself in
order to better see with his intellect. The
great shaman of Lap mythology is a blind
man who sees beyond the distractions of
light or darkness to commune with the
ancestors and the spirits. The tombs of
ancient Egypt are adorned with images
of blind harpists who, it was thought,
hovered between the two worlds and