66 Jessica Jones by Steven Erra

I'm a long time member of the Seeing With Photography Collective, based in New York City, and am posting some of my individual images here at Flickr. Our group has people totally blind, visually impaired and "normally" sighted. I'm in the visually impaired-legally blind category, and still retain a little eyesight, but not much.

The images in this series are all light paintings made using a 4x5 inch view camera and opened shutter in a very dark room. The flashlight is used like a painter's brush to bring out shapes from the darkness.They span many years roughly from 1998 until around 2007, our group rarely uses the big view camera now, as Polaroid has discontinued production of their negative film. I miss it.

 

This picture I made on Jessica"s first day spent with our group, a very emotional one for her as she realized that being recently, and suddenly blind, didn't mean the end of her making art. Jessica joined us accompanied be her newly hired guide and she stumbled badly trying to negotiate the new spaces. She had, like Mike McGarvey, Mark Andres and myself, studied art, and was a serious photographer and art teacher before her eyesight very suddenly went. The strip of white at the left is a part of an arm cast from an injury.

Please visit SWPC's own extensive pro site at Flickr,new images are added there quite often , so you can keep up with our output....

www.flickr.com/photos/seeingwithphotography/

and main website...

www.seeingwithphotography.com/

and my own website too...

home.earthlink.net/~nicomaco/index.html

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