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.