wondering

I’m writing a proposal for a presentation for this. It’s an art conference that’ll take place in Birmingham, UK, this summer. I’ll quote a bit:

[John Szarhowski] designated photographs as either ’windows or mirrors.’ The ‘window’ relates to the subject matter being of prime importance - a straight recording, and the view of the photographer is secondary. Opposite to this is the ‘mirror’ where the photograph’s main purpose is to reflect a viewpoint: for instance, a self conscious conceptual art photograph. Without doubt, it is possible for a blind photographer to record ‘windows’ but surely if there is an inability to critically review your own work purely because of the inability to observe it, can we say with sincerity, that a credible piece of art production is inconceivable? Christine Leahey is founder of ‘The View from Here’, an organisation that supports blind artists. She argues “because we live in a visually dominated world, people think that when you go blind your cognitive world goes too.” But what if you are blind from birth, how can cognitive thought be contextualised without visual experiences. Could this unconventional approach to constructing an image be the ‘mirror’ to the blind photographer?

I stumbled upon it and I wondered about it for some time. One thing I said to D. last night, that the difference between blind and sighted is a cognitive difference: sighted people know more about the world than blind people. Of course, this presupposes that there is a one dimensional distinction between sighted and non-sighted. In fact, no such distinction exists. But it is exactly the wall I’ve hit regarding photography. A few weeks ago I read something about drawing, how it’s easier to produce than to recognize. “How can contextual thought be contextualised without visual experiences?” Well, how? It depends on what you understand to be “visual” in that experience. Can we really say that we have “visual” thought? We may think that our thoughts are “pictures” that we think in “images”, images like photographs. And then what is a photograph? To me, at the moment, a photograph is a sheet of paper, or a story someone tells me. On flickr, now that “long photographs” (time-based, I’d call it) are there, a photograph may be a soundscape. And of course, a photograph is the “click” of the shutter, and the sun on my face, something I touch, at arm’s length, a scene someone describes to me. You might think you were looking through a window at what the camera, held by me, saw, I would say you were looking in the mirror of my experience, of the procedure of constructing a photograph out of all these disparate elements: sound, sun on my face, touch, description, editing decisions, my post processing instructions…all that makes up the photograph such as how i produce it. And the paradox is right there: they’re sightless works, but intensely visual at the same time. There is a cognitive split there too: photographs carry their visual-ness on their sleeves, and, because humans are visual animals, we believe in their fictional qualities. And so my point of departure is the question: what if you were to sever the connection between “perceiving with the eyes” and the photographic recording process, what would you get? A window, or a mirror? Or perhaps something altogether different?