[Beavear] sees from the far side of darkness the lights we hold as we try to find our way about. The lights are not in our hands, but in our longings, which are never extinguished: above all in our longing to be seen from the far side of darkness. -John Berger' I climbed the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacim with the photographer Evgen Bavear, who is blind. The pyramid is rugged, irregular, and precipitous. Bavear taps the base step with his right foot and shrugs off assistance. He grasps the central steel railing, tilts his unseeing eyes to the top, and ascends without stopping. We stand on the basalt blocks of the pyramid's upper platform under a dome of sky and cloud. Bavear is dressed precisely, reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec's posters of singer Aristide Bruant (visualize the Parisian dandy transported from Montmartre to Mesoamerica). He wears pressed pants, a black felt hat, and a dramatic red scarf As always, a small, round, metal-rimmed mirror glints on his lapel. The sighted, he knows, don't simply see. They expect, in return, to be seen. Bavear's eye-like mirror captures our gaze and stares back with perfectly matched intensity. Evgen Bavear was born in 1948 in the small village of Lokavec near Trieste in eastern Slovenia. He earned bachelor's degrees in philosophy and history at the University of Ljubljana and taught geography, moving to Paris at age twenty-six arid completing a master's degree and a doctorate in the Philosophy of Aesthetics from the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne. Since his first significant exhibition in 1989, Narcissus Without a Mirror, Bavear has had over one hundred exhibitions of photography in Europe and beyond. Bavear carries three items with him up the pyramid: a flat rectangular package, a compact digital camera, and an image in the private gallery of his mind. Each photo I create must be perfectly ordered in my head before I shoot. He peels a strand of tape from the long edge of the cardboard package and removes a photograph. More accurately, it is a photograph of a photograph. Bavear had floated an image of a woman in a radiant, rippled stream and rephotographed it. At close range, Bavear frames images by feel. At distances beyond touch, he captures what he desires through the broader angle of view. On occasion, he will direct a sighted person's eyes to confirm his mental visualization. In all cases, he relies on autofocus and autoexposure camera technology and embraces the compositional gifts and marvels inherent in framing blind. In the photograph, sun-splashed water washes over the woman's face. He explains the iconography. The woman is an object of affection, unrequited, but Bavear remains hopethl. The stream is close to the Slovenian village where he was born. He remembers the water's luminous transparency from his childhood, before his two separate eye injuries at age twelve, before the farewell to light, before the doctorate from the Sorbonne, before Paris the City of Light named him the official photographer for its Month of Photography. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] But the physical photograph is just a prop. It is required to make the more complex image Bavear has constructed in his mind's eye--a photograph of the photograph within a photograph, set against the iconic backdrop of pyramids and altars. We stand, Bavear knows, on the ceremonial platform of the pyramid of the Great Goddess of Teotihuacan, deity of water, fertility, the earth, and creation. Bavear's ultimate image is driven by the oldest motive. It's an offering to love. He holds up the photograph of the photograph of the woman immersed in the illuminated stream. In the liquid biting blue air of the high valley of central Mexico, he positions it at the pyramid's edge. His camera clicks. What do we make of this photographic hall of mirrors? How do we factor in the poignant fact that its architect will never see his own creation? …