Photo exhibitions assume one thing, that you have eyes that work and get you the feel of the image that often takes your breath away. On the other hand, the display of a set of photos is becoming the eyes of the visually-impaired people and turning the assumption of ‘tactile light’ inside out.
Here, visually-challenged people can see, feel and enjoy the intricate details of a painting without sight inside a photo exhibition built for touch, sound and memory and are traversed to a world hitherto unknown to the blind and becoming the light within.
Emmy CULIANEZ, a French photographer was saddened by the fact that the visually-challenged fellow beings can't enjoy her photographs that she has been voraciously clicking away during her life in the Sultanate of Oman. Her “Touch the Image, Hear the Colors” which got underway at the Rozna Restaurant in Muscat is such an attempt where she is keeping the less-abled together.
The vernissage of her inclusive photography exhibition saw scores of visually disabled men and women from the Al Noor Association for the blind enjoying the exhibition of photos nailed on the fortified walls of Rozna.
The show features 5 photographs of different landscapes and buildings of Oman, depicting five fingers to indicate ‘touch and feel’ and viewers can not just view them, but can read them with their hands, hear them with their ears and reconstruct them in their mind.
“The idea of such a photo exhibition came into my mind after I thought of exploring ways to engage those who are visually challenged without the eyesight and enough of telling what photos ‘looked like’ to my friends. That’s not seeing”, she says.
“That’s a summary and I wanted them to have the full feel of the photos through their inner sight and here I am”, she says that was the beginning of such an exhibition and she built an exhibition that refused to summarise.
Each photo is reprinted using UV embossing and layered resin. Edges become ridges, textures become actual texture. A photo of an Arabian leopard isn’t just labelled ‘furry’, instead, you feel the individual strands radiating outwards, the contrast between the coarse outer hair and the soft undercoat. A cracked wall of a dilapidated building in Yiti becomes a topography of destruction you can trace with your finger.
Her noble initiative is an eye-opener to the world of sightfulness. Sighted people tend to consume photos fast, they scan, judge and move on. Removing vision forces a slower engagement. You spend 4-5 minutes on one image, building it piece by piece. Several sighted visitors said it was the first time they ‘understood’ a photo rather than just recognised it.
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