[Art_beyond_sight_learning_tools] Photography, audio description music video, UN exhibition

[Lisa Yayla]

Hi,
Sending some links to articles followed by text of the articles. Two are 
about photography, one about audio description and one an exhibit that 
was held at the UN.
All the best,
Lisa

Sound Shawdows book photography and blind children

http://www.utne.com/pub/2005_129/promo/11649-1.html
website
http://www.wdydwyd.com/soundshadows.html

Berkeley: Blind photographer's vision extends beyond her eyes
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/18/EBG90B98SE1.DTL

Stevie Wonder video accessible to the blind
http://www.suntimes.com/output/music/sho-sunday-wonder08.html
Steive Wonder Brings Audio Commentary To Music Videos
http://musicvideowire.com/dynamic/article_view.asp?AID=11144

UN headquarters to display works by blind Singaporean artist
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/147252/1/.html

Visionary Photographer Tony Deifell
—By Chuck Terhark, Utne magazine
May / June 2005 Issue

Tony Deifell's phone rang late one night in 1998, and rather than let 
the machine pick up (as was customary at such an hour) he decided to 
answer it. To his shock, a child immediately demanded, "Why do you do 
what you do?!"

To his greater shock, Deifell, a 36-year-old Harvard MBA, activist, 
photographer, consultant, teacher, and leader of a successful nonprofit, 
didn't know how to answer the question.

"I had become good at talking to funders and writing grants with big 
theories and detailed plans," he says. "But I had lost touch with the 
simplicity behind all this complexity. I had to dig deep inside [that 
night] and try to explain to a 12-year-old why I ran an anti-racism 
program, and why it was important -- in the most essential ways."
The late-night call from a stranger prompted Deifell to pose the 
question to others and chronicle their answers with photography 
(www.wdydwyd.com). It also forced him to examine his own place in the 
world. That's no easy task when you've studied business and divinity 
simultaneously, as he has, or your career straddles the often-contrary 
intersection between for-profit and nonprofit business, as his does. He 
felt like he was always on a cusp, and he soon came to refer to his 
passions as "the power of paradox." It's an idea clearly embodied in 
Deifell's newest endeavor, a book of photographs by visually impaired 
children titled Sound Shadows, which is due out from Chronicle Books in 
2007.
The book has been brewing in Deifell since 1992, when he decided to find 
out whether vision was necessary for photography to be meaningful. "As a 
photographer, I was afraid of losing my eyesight, as a pianist would 
fear losing some fingers," he says.
After teaching art to blind children in North Carolina for six years, 
Deifell discovered that not only was sight unnecessary for creating 
photographs, but the images produced by his students were uniquely 
powerful. The children shot them by being attentive to their remaining 
senses -- feeling their subjects, listening carefully to their 
surroundings -- and viewers take away both an impression of how the 
blind "see" the world and new ways in which we might take each other in.
Deifell puts it another way: "It's blind kids teaching the sighted world 
how to see themselves better."

Website
Sound Shadows: A book of photography by blind kids

Send an email to tony at soundshadows.org if you want to be notified when 
the book is published.
“Sagi nahor,” an Aramaic expression found in the Jewish Talmud meaning 
“great light,” is surprisingly an expression for one who cannot see – a 
blind person. Sound Shadows is a collection of personal stories and 
photographs taken by teenagers with “great light,” who participated in a 
photography program at a residential school for the blind in North 
Carolina . Their stories and images are sometimes unusual and other 
times quite ordinary, but together they paint a picture of everyday 
American teenagers who share one important distinction – they “see” the 
world in a different way. Tony Deifell taught photography to blind 
teenagers from 1992 to 1997. Since Tony was a photographer, he feared 
losing his eyesight like a pianist would dread losing her fingers. This 
led him to wonder, “If I were blind, could I still make photographs?” 
So, he decided to find out.
Disbelief was a common reaction at first. Immediately after people 
learned about the project, they were incredulous, “How can a blind 
person make photographs?” Then, they would dig deeper: “Why would 
someone make a photograph that they can’t appreciate themselves?”, “How 
does one judge ‘good’ art and photography?” and other thought-provoking 
questions.

Sound Shadows is a collection of real-life stories and photographs made 
by these blind teenagers. Teens tell stories of lawnmowers, wind and 
cracked sidewalks that are quite different from their sighted peers, yet 
their stories of danger, fear, trust, race and beauty are universal. 
Using the physics of light as a metaphor, the chapters take the reader 
on a journey from DISTORTION to ILLUMINANCE. While the book renders the 
lives of blind teenagers, it illuminates stories found in all of our lives.
Tony simply gave the students automatic cameras. They felt the subject 
with their hands, asked questions about their surroundings and listened 
carefully to what was happening in front of their lenses. They looked 
for “sound shadows” to guide their picture taking.


Currently, the author is looking for promotional partner organizations 
or companies that have members or customers who would be interested in 
this book.
The author is also looking for individuals around the country who may be 
interested in hosting a house party for the book's release that can 
screen a film about the kids, a book signing, or other event that will 
help promote the book.
For more information, please email tony at soundshadows.org


Berkeley: Blind photographer's vision extends beyond her eyes
Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, February 18, 2005
Blindness hasn't removed Berkeley photographer and sculptor Alice 
Wingwall's vision. Pictures keep coming into her head. Only the way she 
composes and frames them has changed. She's busy with her camera, and 
her world is full of color.

One of the life-affirming finds Wingwall made after the ordeal of 
gradually losing her sight to a retinal disease was that light is one 
thing, vision another. True vision takes place in the brain, not in the 
eyes.

Wingwall's brain works fine and therefore she thinks and creates 
visually, as before. She not only continues to make visual art but also 
is entering a new phase as an artist. She's as much in charge of her 
creativity as she was when she could see. She just needs her guide dog, 
her auto-focus camera and human helpers to keep her spatially lined up 
on the goal her inner eye points toward.

"Most people think it's not possible, but the rest of us are out here 
slogging away," said Wingwall, whose ability to perceive light all but 
vanished about four years ago from retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary 
disease she has had since she was a young woman. "Most people say, 'How 
do you do that?' But what they're really saying is, 'You can't do that.' "

Examples of Wingwall's work as an artist going blind are appearing at 
new exhibitions at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and the Townsend Center 
Gallery on the UC Berkeley campus. The museum show, "Blind at the 
Museum," explores the visual worlds of photographers Wingwall and John 
Dugdale, sculptor Robert Morris and multimedia artists Theresa Hak Kyung 
Cha and Joseph Grigely. Opening Feb. 17, a companion show at the 
Townsend focuses on Wingwall's photography.

"We wanted to explore vision and explore what it means to actually see, 
and all the different modalities of seeing," said Katherine Sherwood, a 
UC Berkeley art professor who is co-curating the museum show with Beth 
Dungan, a postdoctoral student at the university's Center for Medicine, 
Humanities and Law.

The two events come at a time when the traditional meanings of vision 
and blindness are giving way, and along with them the barriers visually 
impaired artists have faced to getting defined by their work instead of 
by their disability. Behind the shift are revolutionary ideas about how 
the brain forms images.

It seems a healthy brain is capable of representing line, color and 
perspective from a variety of sources, not merely from eyesight. This 
means that a sightless person can see and that a sightless person with 
artistic ability can give a powerful, organized representation of 
reality in a way that an artist with intact eyesight normally wouldn't. 
And because the optic eye fixes on objects and on the boundaries between 
things, some say the inner eye sees wider.

"Because we live in a visually dominant world, people think that when 
you go blind your cognitive world goes, too. That's not true," said 
Christine Leahey of Santa Monica, founder of The View from Here, an 
organization that supports blind and visually impaired artists. (The 
organization's Web site, www.zoot.net/theviewfromhere/, has articles and 
images.)

The idea that blindness isn't the opposite of vision is something 
philosophers proposed decades ago. Brain research has affirmed it in the 
past 10 years, and in the past year or two the work of blind artists has 
begun breaking into mainstream venues.

"For these artists to be shown simply because they're artists, that's 
the novelty," Leahey said. "That's a cause of social justice. The way I 
see it, that's an extension of the civil rights movement."

Wingwall, who is married to architect and UC Berkeley architecture 
professor Donlyn Lyndon and has three children and three grandchildren, 
has advantages that many blind artists lack. She had been a respected 
conceptual artist long before her eyesight failed. Her disability 
developed slowly, enabling her to adjust. Perhaps most important, her 
visual memory is rich from a lifetime of working and traveling.

She can't make out edges now unless the light is very bright, but memory 
keeps her encounters with sculpture and architecture alive in her mind 
and available to guide new work, such as "Cordelia's Granite Waterway," 
a four- pooled water sculpture she created in 2002 for a residence in 
Austin, Texas. She can't see colors, but memory lets her experience her 
favorite -- magenta -- as intensely as when her eyes could translate to 
her brain the frequency known as red.

In some ways color is more vital to Wingwall as a blind woman. Along 
with humor and industry, it's a critical part of how she keeps her 
spirit and identity strong in spite of the trauma of her disability. She 
expresses her attitude every day by wearing bright clothes.

"I have this one idea, which is 'see or be seen,' '' she said. "If I 
can't see, I'm going to make myself feel better and everybody else look 
at these wonderful colors -- mostly red, orange, electric blue, magenta, 
fuchsia."

Along with fully lit memories, Wingwall combines elements gathered by 
touch and sound as her vision faded and finally went dark. The most 
important of these deal with the relationships she has had with her two 
guide dogs, the Labrador retriever, Slater, and his predecessor, Joseph. 
All four images on display at the museum concern Wingwall and her dogs.

"Hand Over Dog: Joseph at the Temple of Dendur," is a photo Wingwall 
made 11 years ago, when her vision was going but she could still make 
out shapes. She had long admired the ancient Egyptian temple installed 
in a museum in New York. She took Joseph to see it and used her camera 
to explore the bond she and the dog were developing.

The picture shows Wingwall's hand held out in front of the camera and 
pointing toward the temple, with Joseph sitting in the foreground. "I'm 
pointing to a building that I love and that I want him to know about," 
she said.

She went on to develop the theme using blowups of the dog superimposed 
on other admired buildings. Joseph floats down through the clouds over 
Mission San Rafael and fills the sky over Chambourd in France. "It's 
like now he's entered my life and he's a gigantic presence," Wingwall said.

The adjustments in perspective that Wingwall has made since going blind 
also apply to how she frames images. She has a newfound freedom about 
where the edges of a picture should go. The clear-cut centering that a 
person with eyesight takes for granted isn't available to someone who 
can't see.

"The edge just starts going," Wingwall said. "I don't really start with 
the frame. Lately I've been trying to work with things, trying to bunch 
up against the frame."

A photographer fully tuned to light and architectural history might see 
her task as to capture the full unity of a building such as San Trovaso, 
a historic church in Venice. But to make her "Self-Portrait at San 
Trovaso," Wingwall photographed the front of the church and composed a 
mosaic of architectural parts and parts of herself. Curved decorative 
stone pieces became hair curls around her face, a round window became 
her torso, an engraved stone from ancient Rome her pelvis and a column 
one of her legs, paired with an image of one of her real legs.

Wingwall's passion for architecture is reflected in her name. Inspired 
by a street shrine on a Roman building with a stone cherub who seemed to 
be pulling the building forward despite having lost one of her wings, 
she changed her name to Wingwall in 1980. She was born Alice Atkinson in 
Indianapolis and grew up in rural Indiana.

Wingwall co-directed a short autobiographical film, "Miss BlindSight/The 
Wingwall Auditions.'' Since going blind she has become more interested 
in movement and hopes to make more films.

"You can have bad days," she said. "You can sit there and cry. Then you 
think there's always something I want to do. Better get up and load the 
film."

In addition to photography, Wingwall is working on a project with a 
rugmaker in Sonoma County, Hansine Pedersen Goran. They're designing a 
rug based on one of her drawings, showing the artist's hand holding a 
coin with a Roman temple engraved on it. She is working on a second 
design that will be dominated by dark red and will include a written 
message.

"What I'm going to have on that one are Braille dots for three words: 
lumière, magenta and aileron," she said. "Lumière is French for light -- 
we're wishing for light, wishing I could have more light, more 
physiological vision. Magenta is just a color I adore and wear a lot. 
Aileron has to do with wings and flying."

Learn more
-- "Blind at the Museum," an exhibition of the work of Alice Wingwall 
and other blind or visually impaired artists, UC Berkeley Art Museum, 
through July 24. $8, $5 for seniors and students ages 12-18. (510) 
642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

-- A free public conference on visual impairment and art is set for 4-7 
p.m. March 11-12, in the Museum Theater, with a public reception for the 
artist 6-7 p.m. March 11.

-- A companion show highlighting Wingwall's work runs Feb.17-April 4 at 
the Townsend Center Gallery, 220 Stephens Hall on the UC campus. A 
conversation between Wingwall and John Terry, dean of fine arts at the 
Rhode Island School of Design, with a screening of Wingwall's film "Miss 
BlindSight/The Wingwall Auditions," takes place at the gallery 4 to 6 
p.m. March 3. Free. (510) 643-9470. townsendcenter.berkeley.edu.

Stevie Wonder video accessible to the blind
May 8, 2005

In what is being billed as the first ''descriptive music video,'' the 
clip for Stevie Wonder's ''So What the Fuss'' will be available with an 
audio track from rapper Busta Rhymes in an effort to convey its story 
line to blind and low vision fans. Rhymes' commentary can be accessed by 
using the SAP (Second Audio Program) function on equipped televisions.

Wonder will premiere the Paul Hunter-directed video in its standard and 
enhanced versions Monday in Los Angeles. Two days later, both versions 
will premiere online via Yahoo! Music.

''Until now music videos have been very one-dimensional for those who 
are blind or with low vision,'' Wonder says. ''Now all music video fans 
will be able to apply their vision to my video thanks to the descriptive 
technique and of course, a great narration by Busta Rhymes.''

''So What the Fuss'' is the first single from Wonder's long-awaited new 
album, ''A Time 2 Love,'' which was originally scheduled for release 
earlier this week via Motown but has now been pushed to this summer. The 
cut, which features Prince on guitar and En Vogue on backing vocals, 
peaked last month at No. 34 on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart.

And while his only confirmed show at deadline comes May 21 in Las Vegas 
as part of the annual Tiger Jam, Wonder is planning to tour in support 
of this record later this year. Billboard.com has learned the artist is 
also hoping to stage a concert at some point at a New York park.

A spokesperson for the New York Parks Department would say only that 
discussions are under way for a concert in the fall, and that a venue 
has not been decided. The performance may also be chronicled for 
broadcast at a later date.


Steive Wonder Brings Audio Commentary To Music Videos

Stevie Wonder is bringing a new idea to programming for the sight 
impaired: music videos with an audio commentary. Wonder, 55, who has 
been blind since childhood said in a release, "Until now music videos 
have been very one-dimensional for those who are blind or with low 
vision... Now all music-video fans will be able to apply their vision to 
my video, thanks to the descriptive technique."

The descriptive track will be provided by artist Busta Rhymes. The 
single, "So What the Fuss," also features contributions from Prince on 
guitar and backing vocals from En Vogue. Wonder chose Busta Rhymes to 
narrate because of his "characteristic flair." The commentary can be 
heard using the SAP function on a television, and will also be available 
for download on May 9 on Yahoo! Music.


http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/147252/1/.html
UN headquarters to display works by blind Singaporean artist
By Yvonne Ang, Channel NewsAsia

SINGAPORE : The United Nations headquarters in New York will soon 
display the works of a Singaporean artist for the first time.
When Chng Seok Tin found out, at the age of 42, that she had lost 90 
percent of her eyesight after an operation to remove a brain abscess, 
she was devastated.
"I felt very, very upset, just could not face it, of course. For one 
year I was in agony, solitude and despair, you know, frustration, very 
negative feelings," she said.

Seventeen years later, she is a well-known local artist, and will soon 
have the rare honour of exhibiting her collection at the UN headquarters.

Entitled "Passage to...", the exhibit consists of 35 pieces illustrating 
the different phases of her life, drawn after she lost her sight.

A holder of two master degrees in art, Ms Chng explained that initially 
her works were very dark and heavy, reflecting her gloomy outlook, but 
over the years they evolved into vibrant watercolour pieces.

"Though life is full of suffering and full of depression, still there is 
something wonderful, something beautiful, that you should treasure it 
and live for it," she said.

She continues to travel extensively to display her work, sometimes 
painting the places she visits based on descriptions provided by friends.

Aside from having participated in over 70 exhibitions around the world, 
the former printmaking teacher is also an accomplished Chinese author, 
with 12 published books to her name.

Ms Chng's prints will be on display in New York from May 24 to 27. - CNA /ct