Seeing Beyond Sight: Photographs by Blind Teenagers April 6, 2007

The exhibition 'Seeing Beyond Sight' is the product of Sound Shadows, a literacy-through-photography class taught by Tony Deifell, Shirley Hand, Dan Partridge and Jessica Toal from 1992 to 1997 at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, North Carolina. Even before you know that these pictures were taken by blind teenagers, they are striking in their use of light and composition and haunting in their chiaroscuro intensity. Accompanying the images are the students' own words and captions -- in which you see how much the taking of pictures came to mean to them and how the creative process works in ways rarely experienced. With its ambitious, seemingly paradoxical premise, 'Seeing Beyond Sight' challenges your definitions of art, vision and perception and what it really means to see.