From Booklist
In 1992 Deifell started a photography club at North Carolina's Governor Morehead School for the Blind. From three students, the club burgeoned into a class entitled "Sound Shadows." Culling from the teenage students' photos during his five years at the school, Deifell mounts an impressive showcase in chapters--"Distortion," "Refraction," "Reflection," "Transparence," and "Illuminance"--whose titles he explains in the introduction. Ranging in degree of blindness from low vision to light perception to no vision, the students used point-and-shoot cameras and, as "Sound Shadows" suggests, aural and other sensory cues to find subjects. Reason and fancy played large parts, too. To photograph the wind, a 13-year-old shot leaves scattered on the ground. One girl's first picture was an act of protest; she shot a badly cracked campus sidewalk and sent the image to the superintendent. For a self-portrait, another 13-year-old shot her reflection in a car's passenger-side mirror. Some illustrated dreams and fears very effectively. All made vigorous and moving "this is my world" pictures. Not a few made high-order "art" photos.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Description
For five years, Tony Deifell taught teenagers to take photographs. The students were blind. Unusual as the idea may seem at first, putting cameras in the hands of visually impaired children proved to be extremely 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 intuitive creation. Even before you know that these pictures were taken by the blind, they are striking for their use of light and composition, and haunting in their chiaroscuro intensity. The photos are accompanied by in-depth text explaining the origins of the "Sound Shadows" program, and detailing how the children were taught to take photographs. Accompanying the images are the students' own words and captions-in which we see how much the taking of pictures came to mean to them and the creative process at work in ways rarely experienced. This is a volume that speaks with rare inspirational power to aficionados of photography, the disabled community at large, as well as to the general reader. A book of visual art created by those who have limited or no sight. "Seeing Beyond Sight" documents a program whose ambitious, seemingly contradictory premise led to new avenues of creative expression for these students. "Seeing Beyond Sight" demonstrates countless new ways for all of us to think about vision, art, and perception, and what it means to see.
