Camera. Blind. Project

Through the pictures taken by several ex-blind people, blindness acquired because of a disease during their lives, we define what is left from the past in memory, how the passage of time affects memories, what are the remains of experiences, which image we miss the most, what is the color of the darkness in which these people live. We choose for our project a country, Ethiopia, where images are virtually absent, no billboards in its roads, no pictures in their shop windows, people do not take photos at each other incessantly. We involved people coming from the furthest points north of the country, places inhabited by animist tribes, people who tattoo their skin as a cure to a disease and where there are still many of them with a reversible blindness, non-existent in our continent for the ease and accessibility of our world to its cure. Portraits of patients, family members, accompanying people, guides, all the people who want to pose for us and that is somehow related to blindness in that part of the world. We made the portraits in the room of the small hospital. We shift beds, bags, urinals and other objects and we install our artificial light study consisting of three flashes, for a few hours a day. An hour after regaining sight and minutes before leaving the hospital, we gave them analog cameras asking them to photograph all those dreams and memories about which they have spoken in the interview before surgery, to make real in their new lives their "latent images". To do this, just a compact camera with auto flash, a 200 ASA color film roll and a short explanation of the use of the camera before leaving. Many of them live in churches, or small towns that roads do not reach, others are nomadic.