(Video link here.) When commercial photographer John Dugdale lost most of his sight almost twenty years ago, he did not give up photography as one would have imagined. Instead, he started photographing in a new way, using a huge view camera and employing 19th century forms and processes. Life forced him to “see in a new way” and his art photographs became highly acclaimed.

Among his many commissions was the ad campaign for a revival of William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker. This video gives insight into his unique process and the “lesson” he took from his blindness.

“There is an alternate world out there that is as powerful as anything one might describe as normal. Whatever it is that you think is your adversity is actually your strength.”

john dugdale flower
john dugdale

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4 replies on “blind, a photographer reinvents himself

  1. john is full of insight .
    What a reminder to be thankful always.

  2. pity this busy monster, manunkind,

    not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
    your victim (death and life safely beyond)

    plays with the bigness of his littleness
    — electrons deify one razorblade
    into a mountainrange; lenses extend
    unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
    returns on its unself.
    A world of made
    is not a world of born — pity poor flesh

    and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
    fine specimen of hypermagical

    ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

    a hopeless case if — listen: there’s a hell
    of a good universe next door; let’s go

    E. E. Cummings

  3. …there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.

    PERFECT!

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