Senses
I worked with the Boston deaf-blind community for about one year between 2004 and 2005, with the intention of promoting better understanding of the deaf-blind, documenting their daily experience, and exploring ways that photographs can transcend the visual, becoming meaningful to those who cannot see or hear. The deaf-blind often use sign language to communicate, but since they cannot see the motions of each other’s hands, they touch each other’s hands to feel gestures that are typically interpreted visually. The sign language they use is so visually rich that someone who knows nothing of sign language can still grasp the emotional tone of the conversation. I have strived to explore the private, intimate and beautifully expressive qualities of their conversation in my photographs. I exhibit these images together with comments and stories written and told by members of the deaf-blind community.
The wood etchings, created in collaboration with American artist James Patten, aim to give deaf-blind visitors to the gallery a way to experience the photographs and give sighted visitors an opportunity to explore the boundaries between tactile and visual means of perceiving the world. These works are as much about the interaction of gallery visitors with the images and the interdependence of our senses as they are about the images themselves. As visitors touch the etchings, over time they will begin to show patterns of wear that will reveal the routes people have explored with their hands. These patterns, left by many individual finger traces, will serve as a record of how people have experienced each photograph as well as a commentary on the primary modality with which deaf-blind people experience the world. For many in the deaf-blind community, touching these images of themselves was the first opportunity to experience the medium of photography.
