Comment from the Field

Abstract

A couple of years ago I stopped using the words blind and visually impaired to describe my experience because I realized that my experience did not center on the visual sense anymore. I had just moved to Portland and was in the process of learning a bunch of important walking routes-like the route from my apartment to the train that would bring me to school, and the route from my apartment to the coffee shop or grocery store. My friend Jason Sturgill had just given me a camera as a way of encouraging me to capture images of the things that might catch my attention on a given day. It was a way for us to get to know each other because we had just started grad school together, and had somewhat identified with one another on the basis that we both had to learn to see differently at a point in our lives: me at age 21, I started to shift toward non-visual ways of knowing the world, and Jason, sometime during his teenage years, he managed, in a split second, to prove the you'll shoot your eye theory is sound, by experimenting with some old tin cans and a BB gun.I would take the camera for the weekend and we would meet up the following week at school so Jason could describe to me what I had shot. Initially my subject matter centered on the moments after a significant peak in the soundscape-like the moment after an abrupt mechanical noise or after someone's voice had risen significantly during a conversation. The only reason that I chose to focus on the moment directly after a sound event, as opposed to focusing on the sound event itself, was because it would take a few seconds for me to pull out the camera and get situated-and by the time the shot was all lined up, the sound in question would already be a memory. I started titling these photos, for myself, after Jillian laughed really loud or when that truck with the backfiring engine passed by. However, I would show the images to Jason, a fair bit of negotiating went on between us in order to distinguish what the heck I had photographed. Jason would say something like, you got a picture of a street, it looks like the corner across from the bookstore and I would say something like, oh yeah, that was taken as I was waiting to cross the street, after a truck with a backfiring engine passed by.Soon this process of taking photos based on some non-visual cue synchronized with the process of me learning my walking routes-and it synchronized with a thud. I was walking beside my apartment, toward the crossing street to the train station and, in the process, walked right into a tree branch that was hanging lower than usual due to a recent downpour. Slightly startled, and with a face full of soggy foliage, I reached for my camera and took a photo of the delinquent tree branch-the low hanging tree branch by my apartment. With Jason's encouragement, it became one in a collection of photos of the things that I had physical interactions with while on walks.There were photos of street signs, metal poles, fire hydrants, sandwich boards, brick walls, trees, bike racks, pylons, wet floor signs, windows, doors, fences, bus shelters and a lone land surveyor's tripod. My process went something like this: I would be walking to grab some breakfast at the cafe near my apartment and I would be fantasizing about my morning coffee. My head would be in the clouds of foam that would surely crown the cappuccino that I would order, and would therefore not be on my immediate surroundings. Then thud, I would smash my knee into a bike rack. The rush of pain was my signal to reach into my bag, feel around for the camera, locate the camera, pull out the camera, take the camera out of its case, situate myself and line up the shot. It worked every time in distracting me from the moment of embarrassment that was so often connected to walking into an obstacle in public.Aside from the visual archive that it produced, this six-month dedication came with the added benefit of learning to navigate the city by simply bumping into it. …