”Blind photographers?”

This is the most common question we encounter when we introduce the project that we moderate.

We, Kfir Sivan and Iris Darel-Shinar, are photographers who in the past three years, held a photography workshop for nine enthusiastic and motivated blind people.

Blind people who take pictures may sound absurd or strange because we tend to associate photography with light, vision, focusing, looking at the result, etc. However, our experience of the past years has exposed us to another aspect of photography: this is photography led by imagination, sentiment and all four senses (vision excluded).

The impressive results soon followed.

During the workshop, the students, most of whom never held a camera became acquainted with the history of photography, the structure of the camera and its operation according to the fundamentals of photography. They were then given simple film cameras and used simple techniques we developed to assess the lens aperture, stabilize the camera and aim at the object. The heat of the sun, the noises, voices, smells and other signals help them orient themselves and the camera.

The unusual, special shooting angles, as well as the objects and the subjects they chose to shoot, open a window to their rich, fantastic visual world.

The photography enables them to share their experience and daily life with us, express their creativity, loves and preferences and sometimes, usher us into their closer, more intimate environment.

The website gallery provides a selection of the students' works. All the pictures are full frame.

”Why are blind people taking pictures?”

The question is obvious and the answers are many.

Coping with an activity so closely related to vision challenges them. The blind take pictures to document events like any one else does. The printed photo is for them a piece of memory, of an experience that could be shared with others and clung to many years later.

Photography is a relatively simple technical means to express one's creativity. Photography generates contact and dialogue between them and the people around them – even more so the photos. And most important, photography is for the blind another language and additional means for interacting with the world of the seeing people.

You are invited to watch (in ”PRESS”) an interesting video done by CNN about the group and their work.