*As a 2023-24 Diamonstein-Spielvogal Fellow at the New York Public Library, I was asked to give a public lecture in the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities on March 8, 2024 called: “Image Description and the Critical Blind Gaze.” Below is the recording of the lecture—including questions from the star-studded audience!—followed by a cleaned-up transcript of my lecture plus a list of references.*
Introduction
Thank you all so much for being here.
This is a presentation about photography, but I will not be showing any photographs today. At least, not to your eyes. Instead, I will rely on image description to display some of the photos of anonymous blind people I found in the Wallach collection. The images will come to you through words, perhaps through your ears if you are a hearing person.
Image Description as Slow Seeing
Image description translates a visual object into a verbal object. As with all translations, something will be lost and something gained in the process. Seeing through language takes time. What is lost is the instantaneous look. What is gained is slow seeing.
My concept of slow seeing was inspired by Susan Sontag’s call for
“acts of criticism which would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art,”
as she wrote in “Against Interpretation.”
The Aesthetics of Access
Image description is both a mode of access and of criticism. These two modes, access and criticism, are not mutually exclusive. I hope to demonstrate today that they may even be dependent on one another. If given that loving attention Sontag suggests, image description will reveal itself to be an aesthetic practice—an aesthetic of access.
With that joyful concept hovering in the air, let’s turn to our first photograph:
Case Study: “Blind Woman”
A woman captured in stark black and white wears a sign: BLIND in all caps. The painted sign is perhaps the size of a hand but feels really big and loud. The white sign stands out against her black tunic, as does her pale, weathered face, itself accentuated by her black headscarf. Her right eye, the one closest to the camera, is half-closed under a heavy lid. What can be seen of that eyeball is grey, perhaps obscured by a cataract. From that eye and her sign, we may infer her blindness. The blind woman’s left eye is “jammed” into the corner as if her attention is being grabbed by something to her left.
Thanks to my several sighted informants for their descriptions, and thanks to blind author Georgina Kleege for the term “sighted informant.” You’ll be hearing more from her in a bit.
One of my sighted informants thought Blind Woman’s age was “indistinct”:
“She could be fifty, she could be seventy.”
Another thought her coloring resembled their own:
“of Polish, German, and English descent.”
One saw in her face “a touch of anger and longing.” Another saw her expression as neutral. One noticed a metal broach pinned at her collar with the number “2622.” and zoomed “way in to read the text around it.” It says:
“Licensed Peddler, New York City.”
The shot is fairly tight, from the bust up. The background reveals only a masonry wall. At first glance, with all our biases in place, we might assume that this woman is begging on the street. However, the peddler’s license proclaims her an official newspaper vendor, a not-uncommon occupation for blind people throughout the twentieth century. A blind friend still owns his stand near Times Square.
According to the biographer Carolyn Burke, years after taking her portrait, Strand recalled the blind woman as one of those
“whom life had battered into some sort of extraordinary interest and, in a way, nobility.”
Strand’s words suggest the common nondisabled assumption that a disabled person’s existence is one of unmitigated suffering.
The Perception of Disability in Art
In “The Heroism of Vision,” Susan Sontag considers Strand’s Blind Woman to be an example of
“the search for ‘real’ faces, generally sought among the anonymous, the poor, the socially defenseless, the aged, the insane, people indifferent to (or powerless to protest) the camera’s aggressions.”
While it is true that those making a living on the street may not have the cushiest of lives, it is ableist to assume that disabled people’s lives revolve around suffering simply because they are disabled.
“Many of our lives run counter to the usual stories about disability as only bad news, the curse everyone wants to avoid,”
writes Rosemarie Garland Thompson in her introduction to About Us, an anthology of essays from the New York Times Disability column. She continues:
“We do not necessarily understand our ways of being in the world as disadvantage, diminishment or distress. Such a worldview can be difficult to grasp for people who understand themselves as nondisabled because ours is a minority experience that the majority often find hard to imagine.”
Though Garland Thompson is here considering the nondisabled public generally, as a professor of literature, she is well aware of how these attitudes manifest in cultural productions and the criticism surrounding them. Critics and curators are not immune to the unconscious bias that is ableism.
Access and the Critical Blind Gaze
It seems to me that when museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions think about access, it is often from the standpoint of giving patrons a cultural experience. Inclusion is often perceived to be and constructed as a one-way street. For myself and other blind critics and scholars, access by way of image descriptions and other sensory translations, such as tactile representations, leads to meaningful research and the possibility of unfolding critical attention—a blind critical gaze.
In More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, Georgina Kleege writes:
“True access needs to be understood as something more than a one-sided act of generosity or charity. The presence of those formerly excluded people must be understood to invite a wholesale scrutiny of what the culture takes for granted about itself.”
“Blind people can bring a perspective that has not been articulated before.”
Considering the blind critical gaze means confronting anew such questions as:
- What perspectives have been silenced by inaccessibility?
- What cultural losses accrue because of such critical and curatorial silences?
With those heavy questions hanging in the air, let me take Blind Woman in a new direction. An avant-garde direction!
“Blind Woman” and Modernism
Burke concludes her brief passage on Blind Woman with these words:
“Strand recalled that he took her portrait not so much in the spirit of social reform but because she was the focus of a composition that filled the frame with energy.”
This photo was one of twelve New York City photos that Strand took in the fall of 1916 just after an intense period of “research.” According to Burke, it was
“his self-directed attempt to adapt Cubist techniques to his craft… Turning a group of white porcelain bowls this way and that, he analyzed their depths and surfaces, then photographed them as related shapes.”
When he left his bowls to hit the streets of New York City that fall, he found that his subjects were not so easily turned this way and that. Strand used a prism camera to take Blind Woman’s portrait and others in the series so that he could appear to be pointing his camera in one direction while taking a photo in another, leaving his subjects unaware. This begs the question of how much our blind woman could see of his presence. Given that only about ten percent of blind people have no sight at all, chances are good that she had some vision in that open eye. Perhaps she even had macular degeneration, a fairly common disease of the retina that affects older adults, usually leaving them with no central vision. This is similar to the vision I had when I was visually impaired. (Now I am totally blind.)
I like this theory because it means that our blind woman might have been putting Strand in her usable peripheral vision as he put her into his camera’s peripherally pointed focus.
Blind Woman and Camera Work
Blind Woman first appeared in Camera Work, a magazine of modern photography published by Alfred Stieglitz. The final 1917 double issue was dedicated to Strand’s photos, and he wrote the opening essay. It ends with a rather prickly dismissal of those who disparage photography by comparing it to other mediums:
“Whether a water-color is inferior to an oil, or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence. Let us rather accept joyously and with gratitude everything through which the spirit of man seeks to an ever fuller and more intense self-realization.”
I love the appreciation of diversity implicit in this statement, as well as its lovely sentiment that suggests the visual arts are not just a matter of the eyes, but also, perhaps more importantly, a matter of the spirit. But of course, there is also his strong argument. It gives us the sense that photographers were constantly embattled with respect to photography’s status as art. What is, and is not art, leads me from the blind woman to The Blind Man…
‘The Blind Man’
In April 1917, two months before the final issue of Camera Work, the first American Dada—or more precisely, Proto-Dada—magazine was born. Published by Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and Henri-Pierre Roché, The Blind Man’s first cover featured an illustration by Alfred Frueh, who would be a long-time cartoonist for the New Yorker. (His archive is in the Billy Rose Theater Division of NYPL.) Frueh’s illustration depicts a blind man wearing a top hat. He holds a walking stick in one hand and in the other a long leash attached to a dog that appears to be guiding him.
They are walking past an abstract painting of a woman who is apparently thumbing her nose at him. The blind man seems, at face value, to represent the lay-person who simply cannot see modern art, cannot, as the overused metaphor suggests, understand it.
Things become more complicated as we dive into the slim zine-like volume. On the first page, this declaration:
“The Blind Man will be the link between the pictures and the public, and even between the painters themselves.”
The personified blind man thus can act as a guide through the confusing world of modern art. What is missing of course is the actual blind person. Even so, the metaphorics of blindness serve my purpose here.
“He, [the blind man], will give voice to the enlightening opinions that may spring up, and make them known to all, as impartially as he can, whatever be their tendencies, as long as they are interesting.”
And….
“He will give to lovers of art the pleasure of thinking aloud and hearing others do likewise.”
The editors of The Blind Man suggest the vitality of voicing, speaking aloud the confusions and contradictory opinions surrounding modern art.
That invocation of disparate voices is what I’d like to put pressure on here. With as much bombast and pomp as The Dadas, I declare:
Image description revitalizes the visual in a world that is oversaturated with pictures.
Image description and the critical blind gaze honor photography, and visual art more generally, with time, something I think we all feel is in short supply these days.
As a blind person with remembered sight, I find that good image descriptions develop a photo in my mind’s eye the way it might in the dark room: an eye, a nose. A head, a body, a setting, a sign. This is slow seeing, an unfolding of complexity through time and effort.
As The Blind Man avers, when it comes to discussions of art, a multiplicity of voices has intrinsic merit. When we look silently with our eyes, we rob ourselves, and the world, of that chorus, that beautiful, discordant chorus.
Translating the visual into the verbal offers new opportunities to discover how others see.
Image Description Meets the Punctum
Image descriptions are analogous to other art forms that have commanded respect through the ages: novel descriptions, poetic imagery, and as Georgina Kleege pointed out to me recently, ekphrasis. That is to say that for thousands of years, poets have indulged in lavish descriptions of things like armor and shields. See Homer.
Image description is literary. Which is why I am baffled when author friends hand their books to my sighted partner to describe. I want to shout: Use your words!
This brings me to the problem of timidity when it comes to image description. Perhaps the number one reason for this is that it’s not easy to describe what you see. Yes, it takes time, but it’s also hard to know where to begin. With the overall feel? With the style? With the subject, with a salient detail, the punctum, as Roland Barthes might urge us.
In Camera Lucida he describes the punctum as, “this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces” the individual viewer in a very particular way.”
So, you might choose to begin your description with the thing that pierces you. The punctum is personal.
But seeing is always personal.
When confronted with an image to describe, many fear doing it the wrong way, perhaps even seeing it the wrong way.
Let’s just nip that in the bud and say: The only wrong image description is an absent image description!
Pithy slogans aside, the fears, timidity, and reluctance to describe images is real. The problem has to do with misguided notions about objectivity. Absolute objectivity is neither possible nor desirable, as Kleege puts it. She calls for playful and informative approaches to verbal descriptions.
Objectivity is not possible because we all bring our experience, biases, and affinities to bear when examining an image. Seeing does not just happen in the eyes, it happens in the mind.
Indirect Vision and the Punctum
This brings me back to the spirit of the image. That which is paradoxically not seen, or not immediately seen, in a photograph.
The punctum may not reveal itself until the photo is out of sight. As Barthes puts it:
“Nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum.”
Image description is indirect vision. As such, it can help us find more than what can be seen.
As a blind person working with photographs, image description is both access to source material and source material. I turn to several sighted informants, human and AI, to describe each image. The image descriptions blossom into conversation and reveal the variety of human perception and expression.
The Importance of Alt Text
I want to turn for a moment to a specific kind of image description, and that is alt text.
Image description is a widely used and generic term for translating the visual into the verbal. Alt text is a specific type of image description that embeds text into a digital image. This makes it accessible to blind people through text-to-speech software and braille displays. Alt Text as Poetry was created by blind artist Bojana Coklyat and disabled artist Finnegan Shannon. They created alt text as poetry to help people create, and appreciate alt text. I highly recommend downloading their free workbook. Better yet, invite them to teach a workshop at your organization, as Wallach did last fall! Alt Text as Poetry is aesthetics of access in action. They urge alt text creators to push past dull ideas of compliance when they say:
“Poetry has a lot to teach us about paring down language to create something that is expressive, yet concise.”
Creating alt text for your personal images is a pretty low stakes way to practice your verbal description skills.
Alt text is also an excellent way to produce metadata that can make images searchable. That’s why the Google search engine ranks websites that have alt text higher than those that don’t. Alt text can also help create the metadata that makes image catalogue searches more robust. In that way, image descriptions are useful for all scholars by naming the stuff in the photos.
This is predicated on the assumption, the acceptance, that we may be wrong. When we name what we see.
We will all sometimes get things wrong when it comes to the identity of the other. We need to be okay with that. Okay with making mistakes. If we are afraid to call a person blind, or say that they appear blind, that is a kind of erasure. Born out of a certain amount of squeamishness surrounding disability. I have encountered this kind of timidity in the image descriptions generated by both humans and AI! Because of course, AI is educated by us!
Metadata can be helped along by image descriptions. The two things combined provide access. Which results in the possibility of a blind critical gaze.
Blind People in NYPL’s Photos Catalogue
My search for anonymous blind people in the NYPL Prints and Photos online catalogue began with the simple terms: “blind man” and “blind woman.” Unfortunately, the Prints and Photos online catalog has disappeared, closing the door on that crucial research entrance. There is no indication of when it will reopen.
There were five hits for “blind woman” and twenty-nine for “blind man.”
“To demand that the portrait will be a complete portrait of any person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still,”
said Alfred Stieglitz regarding his extended photo portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe that comprised hundreds of photos.
I only have a single photo for each individual, a micro-sliver of who they were. But in reading a few together, we might flesh out a fuller blind picture.
What follows is one train of associations in this photo portrait of anonymous blind people taken over the course of a century. I chose these particular photos for their blind signs.
In “The Heroism of Vision,” Susan Sontag notes that
“what a photograph is of is always of primary importance.”
If the subject of the photograph is “visually ambiguous,” we don’t know how to react “until we know what piece of the world it is.”
The “blind” sign mitigates ambiguity.
Lisette Model’s “Blind Man, Paris” (1937)
Lisette Model’s 1937 photo, “Blind Man, Paris,” features a white man in his sixties or seventies wearing a sign around his neck. The printed sign boldly proclaims (again in all caps) the word “AVEUGLE” (“BLIND”), followed by an odd little message. Thanks to my translator friend for deciphering the print, which is rather worn and faded, as if this sign has been working for the man for some time, and rendering it into English:
“I am the only one who can tell by touch the value and country of the coin that is entrusted to me.”
This strikes me as a boast or a parlor trick: give me a coin from around the world, and I can tell by feel where it’s from and what it’s worth. Or is it also a warning: do not try to fool me and give me some foreign coin in some tiny denomination.
The man’s clothes appear to have been good quality at one time: a straw hat, jacket, and vest, but are now ill-fitting and shabby. The soles of his shoes are peeling away.
I’ve spent a good portion of my life thinking and writing about the history of blind education, and so it feels particularly poignant to find this blind beggar in the city of the first school for the blind in the world. Valentin Haüy founded the Royal Institute for the Young Blind in Paris in 1785. He pioneered the use of embossed letters to teach his students how to read, do math, learn history and geography, etc. NYPL’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Division is home to the first, 1786 edition of Haüy’s Essay sur l’Éducation des Aveugles, which laid out his pedagogical methods. (It is currently on view in the Treasures exhibit.)
In less than forty years after the school opened, a young Louis Braille would enter that school, be educated using embossed Latin characters, and realize their limitations. They were cumbersome to read and almost impossible to write. So, at the ripe old age of sixteen, Braille invented the raised-dot system that we still use today.
Walter Silver’s Blind Pencil Vendor (1950s)
Turning to another photo… Walter Silver’s blind pencil vendor, taken in 1950s New York City, features an older white man in a heavy coat sitting on the ledge of what appears to be a department store window. The man holds pencils in one hand and a sign written on the lid of the box that he’s holding on his lap with the word, “Blind” in big letters, and in smaller print: “Please buy a pencil. Thank you.”
Though we refer to him as a blind pencil vendor, one has the sense from this sign that there is no fixed price for these pencils and no change expected. The pencils seem to be a pretext for begging. That pretext was already an old one when journalist reformer Jacob Riis wrote How the Other Half Lives in 1890, a book that exposed the extreme poverty of New York City tenements:
“The blind beggar alone is winked at in New York’s streets, because the authorities do not know what else to do with him. . . . The annual pittance of thirty or forty dollars which he receives from the city serves to keep his landlord in good humor; for the rest his misfortune and his thin disguise of selling pencils on the street corners must provide.”
Selling or begging, the blind sign may have evoked pity or ridicule, but it may also have offered some practical benefit. For blind people moving through busy city streets, a blind sign told sighted people to, watch out!
Blind people have been using staffs and sticks at least as far back as literary and artistic representations show, but it was not until 1921 that a British photographer, blinded in World War I, hit upon the idea of painting the cane white. It makes sense that a photographer would have recognized the importance of contrast!
But it was not until after World War II that a training method for the use of a white cane, sweeping it back and forth, was codified.
Thus, Strand’s Blind Woman and Model’s Blind Man would not have had access to the white cane, and Silver’s was perhaps unaware. Both the men have wood canes, the kind usually used for weight bearing rather than detecting obstacles and level changes. But the white cane performs another function: To signal blindness to the sighted.
I wonder if they would have needed their blind signs if they’d had white canes?
Tina Barney’s “Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library” Series (2019)
After I exhausted my searches in the catalogue for the word blind, I tried blind adjacent terms such as “Braille.” This led me to Tina Barney’s six pigment prints all titled: “Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library.” Andrew Heiskell is an NYPL branch library specifically catering to the needs of blind patrons, but open to all. Barney’s series, dated September 11, 2019, features people reading and includes close-ups of books, braille printouts, slates and styluses, Braille writers, and a Braille display.
Our final portrait is of a black man wearing very dark glasses and a big button that reads: “I AM DEAF BLIND” in all caps. David Lowe, Photo Specialist, noted that his right hand, with its index finger in a kind of relaxed pointing gesture, unconsciously underlines that button.
Sadly, David couldn’t be with us today, but his help navigating the photo collection and giving me front-line descriptions has been invaluable.
Although wearing an identity badge feels anachronistic, there is something refreshing about this photo. The densely packed stack of Braille papers in front of him suggests he is a power braille reader.
As the previous photos are all street scenes, Barney’s indoor scenes of literacy come as a relief. These blind and deaf-blind people are not just wearing signs; they are in a position to create them.
Image Description and Bias
Image descriptions, particularly of people who have been historically marginalized, can bear witness to our deep-seated biases and perhaps help to uproot them. I look forward to the day that I will search image databases for “blind scientist,” “blind professor,” “blind mother,” even, yes, “blind photographer,” and be rewarded with many, many images.
Tactile Translation of “Blind Woman”
Before I wrap up for today, I want to take you on one more journey of sensory translation.
A few months ago, I thought that perhaps getting Blind Woman under my fingers would offer some insight, so I took the digital image of Strand’s photograph to the Dimensions Lab at the Andrew Heiskell Library. The Dimensions Lab is headed up by Chancey Fleet. By the way, I recommend her MIT article: “How Tactile Graphics Can End Image Poverty.” The Dimensions lab offers a mind-boggling array of accessible technology and training.
First, we printed out the image of Blind Woman on special paper that is fed into the Swell Form Graphics Machine.
“It’s like an Easy-Bake Oven,” she told me.
The carbon in the ink swells with the heat to raise the darkest parts the most: her tunic, headscarf, and the word “BLIND.”
My first tactile sight of Blind Woman was revelatory. My sighted informants had said that her sign was big, but the words cannot convey quite so viscerally as touch the stark hugeness of the word BLIND with respect to the rest of the image. In fact, the rest of the image was a bit blurry.
Perhaps you will scold me for leaving the punctum reveal until the end!
But there is something I’ve not yet mentioned about Blind Woman in the copy of Camera Work here at the library: her image has doubled.
In the more than hundred years since its publication, it is both the crisp black and white photogravure that Stieglitz had carefully set into Camera Work, and it is also a ghostly reflection that the years pressed onto its facing page.
One informant describes the phenomenon thus:
“Blind Woman’s ghost is pale rust on pale cream, clear but low contrast and lacking detail, yet its softness and relative subtlety compete with the boldness of the printed image, drawing attention back and forth between the two.”
The tactile ghost image also lacked detail. Yet, it impressed upon me the mirror effect that doubles the word “BLIND” backwards with letters reversed.
Since learning of Blind Woman, she has more than doubled. She suggests an infinitude of blind women stretching into the vanishing points as happens when one stands between two mirrors. Each reflection contains another reflection, each story another story.
We didn’t have time that day to send Blind Woman to the 3D printer, as even a relatively small image takes hours for the layers to build up. But Chancey produced one for me later. It’s pretty cool. In case you’re curious, come on up after the talk and feel Blind Woman!
That first session, our next move was to send the image to the Braille multi-dot-height printer. In addition to printing the neat rows of Braille cells for ordinary text, by varying the height and density of dots, the printer can create maps and other tactile graphics.
Braille printers tend to be loud, and this one’s no exception. Imagine a dozen toy soldiers firing machine gun pellets into cardstock, and you’ll have some sense of the relentless ratatat. Chancey and I eagerly felt the punctiform image emerge, slow-seeing “Blind Woman” together. We had our hands on the emerging image, our fingers competing for the newest bits.
In the relative quiet of a less dense patch of dot fire, Chancey said:
“So we may be the first blind people ever to see this image?”
A jolt of excitement thrilled along my spine. Goosebumps popped up on my skin. Here’s another blind woman, I thought, and she’s with me on this journey, this mission to wrest our representations from the exclusive grasp of the sighted gaze.
“Yeah,” I said, “We’re probably the first to see ‘Blind Woman.’ But we will not be the last.”
Thank you all so much! We have a few minutes for questions! Please say your name before you begin speaking!
**For more “Blind Woman” image descriptions from humans and AI, check out “A quartet of Image Descriptions for Paul Strand’s ‘Blind Woman,’ 1917”!
References
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill and Wang, 1981.
Burke, Carolyn. Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury. Knopf, 2019.
Kleege, Georgina. More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.
Thompson, Rosemarie Garland, and Peter Catapano, editors. About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times. Liveright, 2019.