Walker Evans on Paul Strand’s Blind (1916)

In a 1971 interview with Leslie Katz, Walker Evans was reluctant to talk about photographers and photographs that influenced him. Paul Strand’s 1916 image of the blind peddler was the one photograph he cited:

I remember coming across Paul Strand's Blind Woman when I was very young, and that really bowled me over. I'd already been in that and wanted to do that. It's a very powerful picture. I saw it in the New York Public Library file of "Camera Work," and I remember going out of there over stimulated: "That's the stuff, that's the thing to do." It charged me up.

Leslie Katz. “An Interview with Walker Evans.” (1971) pp. 366-7. In Goldberg, Vicki (Ed.) Photography in Print, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.

Image Theft: A Violation of the Human Spirit?

The dark side of user-generated content: Lara Jade, a 17-year-old Flickr photographer, discovered that a vampish self-portrait she made at age 14 had been ripped off for the cover art of a porn DVD. She tells the story in a Flickr post and asks for help. She writes:

Please could someone help me with this? It feels like I'm pulling at loose strings and that I have no power over people like this. I'm still only 17 and trying to make my way in photography. I feel like I cannot display this picture anymore in case someone knows it from the movie.. or even the fact that someone THINKS im in the movie and it gives me a bad name..

A Thomas Hawk post led me to this photographer, her image, her story… all encapsulated in one Flickr blog post. Maybe the most significant thing I’ve learned in photo wandering over the past few days is the fact that Flickr is a blog aggregator. When I started looking at Flickr last year, I thought of it as an assemblage of photo albums with tags. It didn’t occur to me that someone’s photo stream actually streamed through a feed. I saw comments under images, but only minimal text from the photographer. Stumbling into Rebekka’s photo stream showed me that photographers might include extended text, not just captions. I finally got it! Flickr is a photo blog. Now I’m on the lookout for photo blogs that go beyond the scrapbook mode, blogs that have some ambition about discussing photography and image-making.

The launch vehicle in Hawk’s post was this quote about photo ethics: “I hope that whoever is responsible for the theft of this image pays dearly for what they have done. This is worse than most image theft and is a violation of Lara's human spirit.”

Image theft. A bane to photographers, also to the subjects of photos who are not involved in the social contract implicit in the photograph. In Lara Jade’s case, photographer and subject are one and the same. Consider how “violation of the human spirit” also applies to the blind woman in Paul Strand’s famous 1916 photograph.

A Stroll in the Gallery: Big Ol’ Kiss

Henry Butler. Big Ol’ Kiss. 2005. Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans.

When I searched for “blind photographer” I got dozens of results for bird blinds a photographer might buy and use to hide in. Therein lies a story, but I may not get back to it today. When I tried again with “photographer who is blind,” the first result was Henry Butler, the New Orleans pianist and recording artist. He also does photography. “Big Ol’ Kiss” comes from How EYE See It, a 2005 show at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans. The show’s web page includes more than 30 of Henry’s images plus a short video in which he talks about his motive and process as a blind photographer.

“I was always curious as to why sighted people looked at images and got so focused and intrigued by and enamored with images on paper or on canvas,” Henry says. “So I decided I needed more than just an intellectual explanation for what I was either touching or realizing through somebody else’s eyes. I decided maybe I’ll just become a participant in capturing visual images.”

I went looking for an image created by a blind photographer to illustrate that point, precisely, in my M.I.T. talk. The talk is titled “Re-Imagining Accessibility in Participatory Culture.” The meaning of accessibility goes deeper than minimum standards of access to media allowing passive consumption. Accessibility’s deeper meaning is engagement in creating and transforming media. Henry was curious about the power of visual images, and he knew he wouldn’t understand that power until he began to make visual images for himself. He wanted to participate.

I’ve had a similar experience this month as I’ve constructed the PowerPoint presentations that support the Re-Imagining Accessibility talks. PowerPoint is a highly ritualized use of visual rhetoric supporting, sometimes displacing, oral discourse. PowerPoint always alienated me in meetings and seminars when my role was limited to passive visual consumption. I didn’t begin to make peace with PowerPoint until I figured out how to work with it using my own accessible technology. Now I’m re-imagining its creative possibilities for me. And I’m thinking about how a blind rhettor can re-claim a little gaze in visual rhetoric.

A Stroll in the Gallery: Blind Boy Reading with His Lips

David Seymour. Blind Boy Reading with His Lips. 1948. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

This photograph was part of a David Seymour retrospective exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art In 2006. Seymour was better known as Chim (pronounced “shim” in French), a contraction of his Polish surname, Szyman. He was a pioneering photojournalist in the 1930s who co-founded the legendary photo agency, Magnum Photos, along with Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Brasson.

The photo was taken in Italy in 1948. The boy is reading Braille with his lips because he has no arms. Chim’s humanity and trusting rapport with children is obvious in the way he framed this shot. The image conveys the patient work done by a blind reader to gain access to a text. It expresses one of my deepest convictions about disability: the work of accessibility is creative work.

A Stroll in the Gallery: Blind

Paul Strand. Blind. 1916. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

This photograph of a blind beggar in New York City has haunted me ever since I saw it in a Paul Strand retrospective at the East Wing in 1990. It documents a slice of social history at the height of the “Progressive” Era when New York officials required beggars to be licensed. The beggar’s license number is pinned to her coat above the placard that identifies her as blind. The image stirs fierce feelings in me reaching back to 17^th century Paris and its convenient myth of The Court of Miracles.

Strand captured novel candid images of street people using a large format camera tricked out with a right angle lens. He appeared to be photographing some neutral scene, not his unsuspecting subject. He was too shy, or too ethically naive, to ask permission.