Vision Portraits

Abstract

In his most recent documentary feature Vision Portraits, award-winning filmmaker Rodney Evans follows the stories of four artists – choreographer and dancer Kayla Hamilton, writer Ryan Knighton, photographer John Dugdale and Evans the filmmaker – who are either born sighted (or, like Hamilton, partially sighted) as they negotiate their way out of sightedness into blindness. This article analyzes how Vision Portraits depicts becoming blind as a “rite of passage”, that is, a process in which the wisdom, expertise and embodied knowledge of blind people initiate the newcomers into blindness, guiding them in the process, and showing how blindness, contrary to societal assumptions, can in fact be a bliss, and how arts (including visual arts such as photography and filmmaking) can be practiced regardless of the “absence” of sight or how much there is left of it.