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Paper short abstract

I consider two photobooks that address visual impairment—Les Mains pour voir (Hands for seeing, 1999) by Yoshiko Murakami and Sokohi (Shadow at the bottom, 2022) by Moe Suzuki—in terms of a sense of being-with rather than othering evoked through the adjacency of the photographer to the photographed.

Paper long abstract

I consider two internationally acclaimed books by Japanese female photographers that directly address visual impairment: Les Mains pour voir (Hands for seeing, 1999) by Yoshiko Murakami, in which photographs of unsighted people whom she had gotten to know through her long-term volunteer work as a guide for the blind are presented, along with poems represented in Braille, French, and English; and Sokohi (Shadow in the bottom, 2022) by Moe Suzuki, which chronicles her father’s gradual loss of sight due to glaucoma through photographs of him with a camera, eyeglasses, eyepatches, and a cane, and also of imagined and reconstructed sightings through his eyes. Murakami and Suzuki’s artworks are not only on the visually impaired but also created with them, so that those in front of the camera function more as co-producers than as objects of observation. The two books thus evoke a sense of sharing or being-with, rather than othering or objectifying. The time spent with those who are visually impaired helps form trust and ease with the photographer, who thus exists for them not only for the camerawork but as a fellow human being. The conversations that took place between the photographed and the photographers give agency to the former and physical presence to the latter. The photographers become emotionally invested in the well-being of the photographed. All these aspects contribute to the creation of a sense of ethical concern that counters any judgment of “colonizing” such as the one that Susan Sontag made toward Diane Arbus.

Vision has been assumed to be “degree zero” for the subject of representation in the optic-centrist regime of our times, as pointed out and critiqued by many, including Merleau-Ponty, McLuhan, DeBord, and Kittler. The reverse side of this domination of vision is the mythicization of the blind as martyrs or superhumanly gifted figures whose insight counters their absence of sight, as formulated by de Man and Derrida. In my study, blindness—or sightedness—is less symbolic than corporeal and social. I consider cases in which vision is not a power behind representation but can itself become an object of visual representation.