Seeing Infrared: The World Through the Lens of a Blind Travel Photographer

Seeing Infrared: The World Through the Lens of a Blind Travel Photographer

We all view the world differently. As a travel photographer and writer tackles progressive sight loss, she turns to analogue cameras to capture images that find meaning beyond what is visible. Through her infrared film and introspective words, we glimpse her perfectly imperfect perspective.



When
I returned home from my gap year spent in South
Korea
,
Taiwan
and Japan,
my phone only seemed to work in slow motion, its storage space
stuffed with thousands of photographs. As I flipped through them,
the battered Samsung responding sluggishly as though it shared my
jet lag, I was pulled back in time by scenes so unlike anything I
had grown up with in London:
grizzled mountains with summits lost in translucent cloud,
turquoise seas and crescent moon-shaped beaches of black, volcanic
sand. These faraway landscapes were sealed in my phone as
two-dimensional time machines, crystal clear and luminous with
high-definition colour.

I was more grateful than most that everything I’d seen was
safely backed up, because as well as photographs, I brought home
the diagnosis of a rare, degenerative eye disease. It had
apparently been lying dormant and unnoticed in my eyes since birth,
but had revealed itself right at the end of the best year of my
life. I was glad it was at the end, but even so, spending my last
few weeks in Seoul dipping in and out of hospitals as I received
the terrifying news of future blindness was not exactly how I’d
planned to end my time abroad.

There’s a common misconception that the blind see only
blackness. This is very rarely true. In fact, people without eyes
at all have been known to see a kind of white fog. Since there is
little awareness of what blindness actually is, I find that people
either treat me like I can see nothing at all or, when I
demonstrate any awareness of my surroundings, as if I can see
everything. Yet blindness is a spectrum, and what you see doesn’t
necessarily stay the same; many people, like me, have degenerative
conditions. According to the Royal National Institute of Blind People, 71
per cent of blind or partially sighted people in the UK have had
their sight deteriorate in the last 12 months.


My eyesight has degraded a lot since that first diagnosis aged
19, but as it stands now, when I try to focus on anything –
people’s faces, the written word – I can only see a kind of
shimmer, a vibrating shadow that hovers between me and whatever is
in my field of vision. I can see this shimmer even when I close my
eyes.

Still, the visible world is not altogether lost. I can still
perceive colours, shapes and whatever is in my periphery. I still
go to art galleries and museums, and can enjoy such experiences.
Blindness changes how I engage with beauty, rather than diminishing
my ability to do so. All people see the world differently; partial
vision is just one more lens of subjectivity with which I move
through life.

I continue to travel to beautiful places. Since going blind, I
have spent a year studying at a university in
Kyoto, Japan
. It was a year in which I climbed to mountaintop
castle ruins that appeared to float in a sea of autumn mist, saw a
whole city lost in a swirling snowstorm, chased the cherry blossom
front across the country by bullet train and witnessed
bright-purple midsummer sunsets that were over in a flash.

Yet I have stopped filling my phone’s storage capacity with
crisp, vibrant images, quickly snapped and beamed to the Cloud. My
desire to immortalise the places to which I travel remains, but now
that my vision is different, digital photography feels too perfect,
too representative of what is actually in front of me, rather than
what I can see of it. Instead, I found a way for travel photography
to better reflect the world as I perceive it – and that way was to
embrace analogue processes.


Film, for me, is perfect precisely because it’s unpredictable,
sometimes unreliable, and magnificent in its capacity for beautiful
mistakes and serendipity. You cannot take a picture and then
immediately check it before reshooting with film; you must wait
until the roll (typically 24 or 36 frames) is finished and can be
processed and printed in a darkroom. You have no idea what you have
captured until the very end. Sometimes, heartbreakingly, things go
wrong. All this nerve-wracking potential for error means you are
never complacent about taking a picture.

I was lucky to have an old-school photographer for a father, so
I had an expert on hand as I got to grips with a world that I’d
grown up around but to which I had never previously felt that
connected. We built a darkroom in our bathroom, and he showed me
how to crack open a film canister with a bottle opener inside a
light-proof tent. He showed me how to treat the exposed film with
chemistry to take away its sensitivity to light, revealing the
negatives we would then use to make prints. Together we spent hours
in that small, gloomy room with a single red light bulb, growing
dizzy from chemical fumes, counting the seconds and watching shapes
draw themselves onto the paper’s surface as though sketched by
ghosts.

I came to appreciate the exquisite fragility of film
photography, whereby the tiniest variations in light or time or
liquid can affect a print in myriad ways. Losing my sight made me
more aware of the finely-tuned instrument that is the human eye,
but learning about film photography made me aware of the mechanical
majesty of the camera, the synthetic eye. It’s a piece of
technology that is so commonplace now, and yet I believe Arthur C.
Clarke was not quite right when he said that “any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. It is the
very early forms of photography that seem most like magic to me,
even though we have long since refined and surpassed them. We
shouldn’t take this technology for granted – just as we shouldn’t
take vision for granted, either.


Film was a way for me to level the photographic playing field.
For example, my favourite kind of film to use is colour infrared,
over which I have the same amount of control as anybody else. For
infrared light unifies us all: no one can see it, blind or sighted.
It is not contained within the visible spectrum for humans, so
using infrared film in a camera teaches you to be aware of the
invisible. Light and colour will not be as you see them in front of
you, and that takes some getting used to. The focusing distance is
also different for infrared light, so you learn to train the camera
at a different plane to get the right parts at their sharpest.

With colour infrared film, shot right, you can expect riotous
violet and magenta foliage under turquoise skies. Black and white
infrared film, when used in bright weather with the sun at a
certain angle, reveals black skies and trees that appear laden with
snow. It’s tricky to get spot on, but when you unlock the full
potential of infrared, the results are worth it.

The more I grapple with progressive sight loss, the more I find
myself wanting to explore the world around me with my mechanical
eye. In many ways, I’m glad that blindness has offered me such a
fresh perspective. No longer do I stand before a gorgeous,
far-flung vista and tap without effort at a screen. Taking
photographs has become about so much more than faithfully capturing
what is visible; now it encompasses a poignant awareness of what
can go wrong with our cameras, mechanical or otherwise. The most
important lesson I’ve learned is that even when eyes and cameras
are broken or make mistakes, we can still find and appreciate
beauty.

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