Sight Unseen: Photos by Blind Photographers

If there was one disability I wouldn’t want to experience in my life, it would be blindness. I’m deathly frightened about that – not being able to see the world around me and being stick in a seemingly endless black hole It’s depressing predicament to me, but blind people have been able to live everyday lives and in some cases create extraordinary works of art.

Sight Unseen is a new exhibit at the University of California, Riverside and shows the works of the most accomplished blind photographers in the world. Here are a few of my favourites:

Pete Eckert
Electroman

One of Eckert’s techniques involves using a composite body view camera mounted on a tripod. Focusing with notches carved into a focus rail, he throws his studio into total darkness, opens the shutter, and roams the space “painting” his image with light, using flashlights, candles, lasers and other devices.

Bruce Hall
Limpet

Afflicted with numerous eye conditions, Hall retains highly limited sight. For him, cameras and other optical devices are a means of better perceiving the world around him. “It’s beyond being in love with cameras,” he says. “I need cameras.”

Gerardo Nigenda
…Entre lo invisible y lo tangible …llegando a la homeóstasis emocional

Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, the 42-year-old Nigenda calls his images “Fotos cruzados,” or “intersecting photographs.” As he shoots, he stays aware of sounds, memories, and other sensations. Then he uses a Braille writer to punch texts expressing those the things he felt directly into the photo. The work invokes an elegant double blindness: Nigenda needs a sighted person to describe the photo, but the sighted rely on him to read the Braille.

See more at TIME.com or in the photographer galleries at University of California Riverside.

[via Metafilter]