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Blind Photography Workshop

14. September 2013 @ 11:00 - 16:00

With the increase in availability and access to digital photography over the past decade, Blind Photography has become a popular art form amongst visually impaired people. Using other senses, memory and sometimes interpreters or technical assistants, Blind Photography allows visually impaired artists to connect with the sighted world. By its very nature, it simultaneously challenges traditional photographic practice and ingrained beliefs about visual disability. Despite misconceptions that people without vision cannot participate in the visual arts, digital photography supports the development of artistic skills and knowledge. It uses ‘the digital’ to communicate, to create and to transcend beyond the physical limitations of the body.

As part of a collaborative project entitled Common Bond, Blind Photographers Jan Bölsche (Berlin) and Rosita McKenzie (Edinburgh) are offering a free 5 hour photography workshop where they will share their unique photographic techniques and skills. The workshop is suitable for beginners through to professionals and people of all abilities. Non-sighted participants will learn how to use camera equipment, and how to view, edit and process images. Sighted participants will discover alternative approaches to image making both conceptually and practically.

If you have a digital camera of any kind (including ipads and mobile phones) please bring them with you. We have some spare so please just let us know in advance if you need to borrow one!

The workshop is FREE but places are limited so please email at kate@contemporaryartexchange.org to reserve your place.

Language: German and English

More about the artists:

Rosita McKenzie is a Blind Photographer based in Edinburgh, UK. Self-taught, she has become a leading figure in Scotland in this specialised field, as well as in her role as a respected Disability and Equality Consultant and arts educator. Rosita has exhibited in solo and group shows across Scotland including exhibiting as part of the 2010 and 2012 Edinburgh Art Festivals. She has received commissions from galleries such as Inverleith House in Edinburgh and in 2009 she was invited to California to participate in the Sight Unseen exhibition at the UCR California Museum of Photography which has been touring internationally and is currently hosted by the Sejong Centre in Seoul. Central to her practice is her relationship with her immediate environment or the subject, and in particular how her experience of a moment can be captured. “For myself, it is a personal experience: by using photography as an agent for communication, understanding and remembering, I can preserve live moments as vivid and powerful memories. It is not just about creating a visual art form, but also the process of creative collaboration with others to interpret the image before, during and after it is taken.”

Jan Bölsche works as a photographer and author in Berlin. His photos have been published in newspapers, magazines, travel guides, catalogues and on websits and CD covers. He specializes in capturing the “decisive moment”. Jan is an in-official member (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) of Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur (ZIA), a Berlin independent think tank and design agency, and has provided professional photography services for recent events such as the Konferenz K2 in Berlin titled “Eine Dialogveranstaltung der Kulturverwaltung des Berliner Senat”. Controlled by a defect gene, the cells of Jan Bölsche’s retina started to slowly fade away in his early adolescence. In a still ongoing process, a growing blurry and nebulous spot in the centre of his field of vision covers objects he tries to bring into focus. This medical condition is called “Stargardt’s disease” or Juvenile Macula Degeneration (JMD). Since photoreceptors for the different base colours are not affected evenly, the sensation of colour is quite different from what the rest of us see. Due to the lack of high definition input, Jan’s visual cortex concentrates more on the ‘big picture’, the coarse composition rather than on fine detail. Or as he puts it: “My eyes work more like a film camera from the 1930s than like my digital SLR. Sometimes I am actually surprised by what it captures.”

Common Bond

Both Jan and Rosita have been working together with curator and arts educator Kate Martin from Contemporary Art Exchange on the Common Bond project. The project fosters peer-to-peer mentoring between the two artists where they can share knowledge and skills within their specialised field of Blind Photography. The project facilitates the development of new work that will explore the common bonds shared between British and German culture. For more info, visit http://contemporaryartexchange.org/portfolio/common-bond/

 

Rosita McKenzie is sponsored by The British Council and Creative Scotland
Photo: Rosita McKenzie, Herbairum Cabinets, 2007-2009

Blind Photography Workshop

Details

Date:
14. September 2013
Time:
11:00 - 16:00