Impaired Perceptions

I was born with Congenital Fiber Type Disproportion. Relax, I don’t expect you to know that term; it’s a condition that causes a person to have weak skeletal muscles. Your race and gender affect the way that others perceive you, and having an impairment definitely changes the way that people see you. The physicality of my body is scientific fact, but how it is contextualized is socially constructed. I created a photographic portrait series titled Impaired Perceptions to change the way we draw conclusions about people with impairments. Impaired Perceptions is a black and white portrait series of people with various physical impairments. The focus of the series is on seeing others as individuals. I use direct eye contact and tenebrism to draw the viewer’s eye to the subject’s eyes to aid the viewer in seeing the person in the photograph as an individual. Tenebrism is a technique from the baroque period that uses a high contrast beam of light to draw the eye to the point of focus. I use a soft gradient to show the natural beauty of each person’s form. Some of the people have impairments that are very noticeable in their appearance, but others have impairments that you cannot see simply by looking at them. These two groups are often misperceived in opposite ways. People are often quick to assume that individuals with seeable conditions are incapable of doing most things, and tend to not understand when people with hidden impairments aren’t able to handle something commonly expected of a fully able person. You cannot know what someone is capable of by looking at them. You don’t know a person’s story until they tell it to you. Accompanying the portraits I have interviews with the people in the photographs. After looking at their portrait you can read their story in their own words. You might see them differently after reading their words, and the realization of that little change might affect the way you see a lot of people.