Photographer Pete Eckert stood in the great gallery of Museo Nacional del Prado surrounded by Goya masterpieces and he never saw a thing. He was in Madrid for an exhibition opening of his own photography eleven blocks away at Fundación Once. Eckert kept his white cane folded into his jacket pocket. No one was available to describe the paintings, no one to offer commentary. For him, the wall labels remained blank, the paintings invisible. He stood for fifteen minutes, perhaps more. He turned back and forth slowly, absorbing the museum. He told me later that he could feel the scale of the space and sense the size of the paintings. Eckert is uncannily good at interpreting echo and reverberation. He can turn a clap or a footfall into accurate spatial information. During questions after a talk several years ago in Los Angeles, I saw an audience member challenge him: "You say you can, so describe this room." The tone of the question was openly dubious. Eckert sat on his high stool, asked for complete silence, and snapped his fingers three times. Then he described the space: 14-foot ceilings, he thought, with open trusses, a row of closed clerestory windows high along the back wall, a ninety degree corner to his left. He even tossed in a conjecture about a hallway beyond the wall behind him, all completely accurate as it turned out.

Standing silently in the museum in Madrid, Eckert conjured the paintings he could not see with his mind's eye. Before he became blind and decided to take up photography, Eckert studied at the Art Institute of Boston. Like many blind artists, he carries a visual world with him. "I'm a very visual person, I just can't see," he says. He wandered through internal visualizations of the Goya paintings around him—the point blank massacre of The Third of May 1908 (1814), a war painting without glory or precedent; The Nude Maja (1797-1800), freed of both clothes and allegory, "the first totally profane life-size female nude in Western art," states Dutch Goya scholar Fred Stephen Licht 1; Saturn Devouring His Son (1819-1823), the titan gripping his headless offspring, gaping mouth tearing at the bloody left arm, the fated pair highlighted against enveloping darkness. Eckert left the museum, took a taxi back to his hotel, and had dinner and a glass of wine.

Pete Eckert is a friend and one of the finest blind photographers in the world. His experience among the unseen, undescribed, inaccessible Goya masterpieces in Madrid became a touchstone for me, an example of what should not happen. And this became crucially important when I curated an exhibition for the University of California/California Museum of Photography titled "Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists." Since 2010, the exhibition has traveled internationally to ten additional venues including Kennedy Center for the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Center for Visual Art, Denver, Colorado; Naples Art Museum, Florida; Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; Manuel Alvarez Bravo Center for Photography, Oaxaca, Mexico; and Flacon Art Center, Moscow.

In addition to my curatorial duties for Sight Unseen—an outgrowth of a fourteen-year-long obsession with blindness and photography—I was responsible for conceptualizing the exhibition. The double duty was deliberate. Exhibition design and interpretation is a bridge into the work. In the case of photography by blind artists, I realized the bridge would have to be sturdier and more carefully engineered than most. It needed to deliver sighted visitors close to the center of the subject. When they begin to perceive the overall geography of the subject, then can they launch their own explorations of this philosophically complex terrain. Most vitally, an exhibition of work by blind photographers must be fully alive and available to the blind and visually impaired. How could it be otherwise?

When I start a project, I seek a model, I look for a state-of-the art exemplar. In this case, I found fragments and shards of good practices in various places: the Getty Museum, the British Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. But they seemed partial, what the blind artists called a "good start," rather than an ideal. In the absence of a comprehensive prototype, I have an alternate approach. I locate the worst possible paradigm and move in the opposite direction. What you hate can be as instructive as what you love. For me, Pete Eckert's isolating experience at the Prado in Madrid—and scores more like it recounted by blind friends and artists around the world—became anti-matter, a springboard to react against. But if Eckert's experience is a worst-case example, what should be the goals and strategies of an exemplary exhibition of photography by the blind? On what basis does one chart a course toward accessibility? And how does one accommodate the group most likely to be disabled in their ability to understand this new avant-garde—the sighted?

The first decision was to make accessibility and interpretation integral to my thinking about the exhibition from the start. I am not a disability expert or accessibility advocate, simply an artist and curator drawn into the world of blindness and photography. As I began seeking work and finding artists, I immediately began to address presentation. It seems clear that this approach is rare. Accessibility is most often an afterthought, tacked on after an exhibition has taken shape. For Sight Unseen, the development of accessibility avenues was created in parallel with the curation and core conceptualization of the show.

My thinking about accessibility continued with consideration of blind photographers and their position in the current image economy. Images are the currency of our age, but it's a toss-up whether we live in a time of abundance or debasement. Billions of cell phone images ping around the world, but no one trusts what they see. We live surrounded by a surfeit of images, but this super abundance has devalued and diminished each photograph. Images swirl around us like free-floating particles, touching no one, settling nowhere. They mean little and influence few.

Meanwhile, photographs made by blind artists are a rarity; they are images weighted with meaning. Photographs by blind artists are inherently conceptual. They operate at the heart of the medium, questioning the very nature of sight and blindness, perception and photography. "I feel very close to those who don't consider photography a piece of reality," says blind photographer Evgen Bavčar, "but rather a conceptual structure, a synthetic form of pictorial language, or even at times a Suprematist image." 2 Blind photographers, Bavčar implies, travel into Kazimir Malevich's Black Square (1915) and arrive at light, image, and meaning. Of course, a blind person making photographs is also a political act. By pressing the camera shutter, the blind lay claim to the visual world. They force a reevaluation of our ideas about sight, blindness, and photography.

States Eckert, "I slip photos under the door from the world of the blind to be viewed in the light of the sighted." In this statement one can locate a key conundrum contained within any exhibition of work by blind photographers. The "original" versions of Eckert's images can never be displayed; they remain in his mind. What he slips under the door are, in fact, second hand, one step removed from the original. (In truth, exhibitions of work by blind photographers should begin with a disclaimer: "Please note: All works on display are reproductions. The originals remain within the minds of their creators.")

Eckert's mode of working is to construct a complex image in his mind. Then he devises a way to shoot it on location or in a 30-foot-deep studio he has constructed on his property in Sacramento, California. He casts friends and neighbors as models, builds props, and devises complex lighting. He sets up his Toyo 4" x 5" composite body view camera on a tripod. He has notched the focus rail with set focus points using a diamond-coated jewelry file. When all is ready, Eckert throws the switches that drop his studio into total darkness and opens the shutter. Eckert roams the space and "paints" his image with light.

"I use any light source I can understand." His palette includes flashlights, candles, lasers, lighters, black powder. (Two years ago I was on hand to watch Eckert, in what surely must have been the strangest shoot ever witnessed at the Playboy Studios in Santa Monica, standing in darkness swinging a sparking, spitting blue light taser around model Hiromi Oshima.)

Shutter open, Eckert moves through the darkness deploying his lights to build the image he sees in his mind. Eckert's varied lights operate as an uncannily parallel replacement for the artist's missing sight. The touch of the light sketches an image onto the film. Areas that the light misses remain blank, dark, unseen. "Where I'm going is so different that I have to have a plan. I structure all my shoots the same way. I visualize and then I adapt. I assume it will be about three-quarters the way I planned, and a quarter what happens." The photograph, of course, is a record of a scene before the camera. But with Eckert, it captures more: the artist's gesture, the passage of time, the realization of a mental image, and the outward manifestation of a purely inner mode of seeing.

The finest photographs by the world's blind artists are breathtakingly original. Their creators, after all, are beyond influence by the modern media's visual torrent. Blind photography also raises profound philosophical questions for all of us. What is the difference between mere outward sight and true inner vision? What should we make of highly determined and accomplished photographers who will never see their own creations? Is the impulse behind every shutter click—by sighted and blind alike—an attempt to possess a subterranean essence that, ultimately, cannot be captured?

In the end, photography by the blind points us toward an equalizing truth. All of us, blind and sighted alike, occupy the same position—we live in interior worlds. We build inner realms from what we happen to hear, feel, see. Our selves are constructed from chance fragments and random inputs. We glean accidental scraps from the overwhelming maelstrom of possibility. Out of the sprawling, absurd, comical, delicious flow, we craft our sense of everything. We take strangers and passersby and reconstruct them as friends and lovers. We gather conversations and experiences and weave them into the story of our life. We store up insights and memories and use them to define who we are. Finally, for each of us, that inner creation is our complete world. It is all we possess, all we can know.

How then should 111 photographs by the world's most accomplished blind photographers be presented? Since blind photographers produce visual objects laden with philosophical and political questions, an exhibition such as Sight Unseen is less a visual exercise than a philosophical venture. Ultimately, an exhibition of photography by blind artists must be constructed around its overarching themes—perception itself, the unique character of personal experience, and ultimately how we construct our world and ourselves. In short, such an exhibition should become a laboratory of perception.

I came to view an exhibition of work by blind photographers as a locus for bridges. And, of course, one can travel bridges in both directions. Regarded in this fashion, an exhibition of work by blind photographers becomes a site of connection, crossing, and, with luck, revelation.

The exhibition objectives became for me a series of twinned goals, of brackets.

• The Sight Unseen exhibition should make the museum—too commonly a place that privileges sight almost solely—available to the blind ideally through multiple avenues. But it should also provide the sighted with an illuminating perspective on the world of the blind, too often viewed as a foreign and inchoately frightening place.
• The exhibition should reveal one of the ubiquitous modes of production for blind artists: internal visualization. And the sighted should be invited to consider this "seeing with the mind's eye" as a shared human experience.
• The blind should be given ample tools to fully visualize both the work and the museum, and the sighted should be prompted to discover and ponder the degree of their own unnoticed "blindnesses." Stated another way, rather than merely focusing on making the visual world available to the blind, the exhibition should induce sighted visitors to become aware of their blind spots and perceptive gaps.

A meta-intention of the exhibition thus becomes creating a site where the blind are accorded the right to own and display the products of their visualizations, and where the sighted question the scope and accuracy of their own vision. In a fashion, the exhibition thus aims to reverse the gaze of the sighted. The sighted begin by looking at the work of blind photographers and asking how, but end up looking into themselves, comparing mere outward sight with inner vision, and pondering why. In summary, the goal of exhibition design and interpretive elements should not be one-sided, but reciprocal, aiming to offer the sighted and the blind a profound equalization of status.

The inaugural exhibition of University of Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists took place at the University of California Riverside/California Museum of Photography in 2009. It occupied the full first floor space for featured exhibitions.

The exhibition incorporated the following elements:

• 111 photographs representing work by eleven individual photographers and the members of the Seeing With Photography collective of New York.
• Descriptive biographical essays on each of the artists, incorporating comments and observations in the artists' own words.
• An interpretive essay offering three elements: a preliminary structure for categorizing work by blind photographers, some implications for the sighted world, particularly photographers, and a brief historical overview of the notion of "seeing beyond sight."
• A special concentration on touchable elements: 20 touchable pieces by Gerardo Nigenda and eight photographs by Rosita McKenzie paired with tactile drawings (in all comprising one-quarter of exhibition images).
• Audio recordings of text, interpretative essays, and artist biographies, plus an audio description of every photograph.
• Comprehensive Braille guides to the exhibition—bound volumes including all the didactic text, exhibition essays, and artist biographies. The guides also serve as an entry point to the audio descriptions of individual photographs, providing in Braille the phone number and individual guide numbers for every photograph by every artist.
• Special instruction for museum staff and guides about how to welcome and assist blind or visually impaired visitors, to answer questions, to give tours describing images, to offer guidance or description, and to provide straightforward help if required.

The California Museum of Photography occupies a four-floor 1920s department store building radically transformed in 1986 into a modern museum space by notable San Francisco post-modernist architect Stanley Saitowitz. The architect's operating metaphor was to remake the building into a device for seeing. The third floor, for example, is fronted by a walk-in camera obscura that uses the building itself to capture the outside scene. Conceptual lines of sight extend from camera obscura into the building focusing within a large circular auditorium known as the "ocularium," from the Latin oculus, eye.

The first floor of the museum presented a challenge for an exhibition balanced upon the duality of light and darkness. The museum front is floor-to-ceiling windows flanked on both sides by two-story-high glass block panels. The entrance is flooded with light. As you pass through an expansive foyer, you enter a two-story museum space crossed front to back by a suspended observation bridge of perforated metal decking affixed to steel beams.

A pivotal exhibition design decision was to build a custom freestanding wall across the entrance to the exhibition space to control the wash of light from the front windows. Visitors entered the exhibition in only one way, by passing through the cutoff wall through a "light trap" access, a high-walled, black-painted right turn, left turn. Modeled on a darkroom entrance, it was disguised for the exhibition as a dramatic title wall. The twist of the light trap ushered visitors into the mouth of a 42-foot-long hallway of subdued light. It narrowed as one traveled in creating a forced perspective that extended the visual space. More significantly, it quite precisely echoed the funnel-shaped structure of the optic canal, the portal between eye and brain. Painted charcoal grey, the passageway aimed like a spyglass at a Pete Eckert piece on an interior wall—"Electroman," a near life-size, full length portrait of a man built purely of swirling light. Arrayed along the right hand side of the entry passage were twenty-one pieces by Gerardo Nigenda—black and white images punched with Braille lettering. The row of 8" x 10" prints were set on a touch-height angled shelf and brightly illuminated by a concealed strip of continuous LED ribbon. Prominent signs announced "Feel Free To Touch."

I chose Nigenda's pieces for this prominent location in the exhibition because of their remarkable layers of meaning (and gorgeous combination of visual and tactile qualities). In 1999, 32-year-old Gerardo Nigenda documented the path through city streets from his house to the Álvarez Bravo Photography Center at the heart of Oaxaca, the lovely city set in the high Valles Centrales of Mexico's Sierra Madre del Sur.

Blinded by diabetic retinopathy when he was ten, Nigenda used a range of tools to document his route—a camera and film, but also sounds, memories, murmurs, impressions, comments, reports. Then the artist used a Braille writer to punch texts directly into the photographs. Punctures pierce the photo emulsion, and the narratives are so crisply descriptive that they verge on imagist poetry. "A half-open white door made of two metal sheets." "White pillars. The wall has a green climbing vine with purple flowers. Between the pillars there are plants and pots that are also green. The plants are mostly cacti."

In subsequent years, Nigenda deepened his work into an ongoing exploration of seeing beyond sight. One set of photographs depicts landscapes. Their Braille texts, rather than being descriptive, focus on varied perceptions—hearing, touch, smell—and their role in establishing location, impression, and meaning. In other photographs, the touch of the artist's hands stand in for sight and the Braille breaks loose of the standard rigid columns, instead interacting with objects on the photographic surface.

Nigenda calls the images "Fotos cruzados," intersecting photographs. In fact, each photograph is a double blindness. (Or is it a double vision?) Nigenda needs a sighted person to describe the photograph, but the sighted rely on Nigenda to read the Braille. Both transactions are required to create or to read Nigenda's images. The images unify the graphic representation of photographs with the coded writing of Braille. They make a light-sensitive material sensitive also to touch. But they perform an additional trick: they construct—even require—a bridge between the worlds of the blind and the sighted.

Across from Nigenda's work, along the left hand side of the narrowing hallway entrance, the exhibition offered 20 quotations at eye level. They were computer output at large scale and addressed issues of vision, blindness, perception, and photography. I chose them not to provide answers, but to provoke thought. Here are five.

"…all photographers, in the end, imagine and remember their images much more than they actually perceive them… In other words, [like a blind photographer], all photographers, in the end, see things with their eyes closed." —Benjamin Mayer-Foulkes 3

"Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be." —Duane Michals 4

"… above all I visualized. It was an enchantment to watch appearances on the screen inside me, and then to see the screen unfolding like an endless roll of film…. After all, isn't it true that the realities of the inner life seem like marvels only because we live so far away from them?" —Jacques Lusseyran 5

"Blind or not, we all live in the amphibious and changeable kingdom of light and shadow. No photograph exists that has not passed through darkness—not even the most radiant image. No blind person is forever shut out from light, however narrow the crevice through which he or she peers." —Alfonso Morales 6

"Traditional photographers are the ones who are really a little bit blind from being constantly bombarded with images. I sometimes ask them what they see, but it's hard for them to tell me. It's very difficult for them to find genuine images, beyond clichés. It's the world that's blind: there are too many images, a kind of pollution." —Evgen Bavčar 7

The interior of the Sight Unseen exhibition featured brilliantly lit photographs hung on matt black walls. Grant money allowed the purchase of a custom lighting system for the exhibition. A halogen spotlight was dedicated to each image and fastened above to taut horizontal wires. The goal was to highlight the images, let them leap brightly from darkness.

As mentioned earlier, a comprehensive audio version of the exhibition was offered in parallel to the visual presentation. The new technologies to make this happen are remarkable, straightforward, and inexpensive. The audio was made available to museum visitors on any cell phone through "Guide-by-Cell" technology. The museum uploaded mp3 files. Visitors simply connected by phone then punched in the posted number or read Braille guide books to access the numbers. Free phones were available for check out at the front desk for those without them. The didactic text, exhibition essays, artist biographies, and an individual description of every photograph were available as audio. The comprehensive audio also became a key part of the online exhibition. When one views an online image or clicks on an artist biography or show essay, under-the-hood peogramming automatically triggers the playing of the audio.

Blind artists have a huge stake in accessibility and museum policies. The blind artists I know, a wide range across the world at this point, will discuss issues of access and equality all day long, reporting trouble, planning activism, pointing out areas of gain, identifying individual institutional programs they love or hate. However, all finally admit that accessibility gains, while incremental and herky-jerky, are generally on a positive path.

When a blind artist makes photographs it is inherently a political act, a claiming of territory. "What I mean by the desire for images," writes Evgen Bavčar, "is that when we imagine things, we exist. I can't belong to this world if I can't imagine it in my own way. When a blind person says 'I imagine', it means he too has an inner representation of external realities." But above and beyond the intrinsic political statement, a number of the artists in Sight Unseen are accessibility activists, directly addressing this issue in their lives and their work. Rosita McKenzie, Alice Wingwall, and Pete Eckert are chief among them, and I interviewed all three in order to write this article.

Rosita McKenzie's photography is an extension of her role as a disability activist and champion for Scotland's blind and visually impaired. Her photography did not begin through the usual collision of artistic inclination and opportunity, but as a way to reinforce a claim to the visual world. McKenzie's photographs continue to evolve, retaining or even amplifying their political content, but also expanding into a more purely artistic endeavor.

McKenzie, a resident of Edinburgh, is an advisor to the Scottish Arts Council, and works as an educator and Disability Equality Consultant. She advises a wide variety of organizations on interpretation, access, and participation for the disabled, blind, and visually impaired. These include the National Trust for Scotland, National Museums of Scotland, and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Her work on behalf of disabled students at Queen Margaret University College led to the university's disability computer center carrying her name.

Significantly, McKenzie shows her photographs paired with same size "tactile drawings," Braille-like touchable prints with raised lines. The tactile drawings are done by her collaborator Camilla Adams, an Edinburgh artist and illustrator. Accessibility is thus built into her working methods. McKenzie also stresses the significance of touch. On a recent visit to Italy, she ignored posted signs and touched the ancient travertine blocks of the Coliseum. "I felt myself connecting with history," she said. "Touch is connection and I could feel all that history—slaves and Emperors, crowds and spectacles." 8 McKenzie points out that museums and cultural sites are coming to rely on audio guides to provide accessibility for the visually impaired. In doing so, some are eliminating a former avenue of experience: touchable elements. "If all I wanted to do was listen to a description of the Coliseum without touching anything, I might as well stay at home and listen on the computer."9

Some of Rosita McKenzie's photographic projects are overtly political. For example, she produced photographs depicting shop fronts and windows displays, titling the work "Temptation Denied." To the sighted, a glass-fronted store display is a framed view; to the blind it is a blank, a cipher, a social and psychological barrier. Through McKenzie's camera, the shop windows become symbols of inaccessibility.

Nonetheless, McKenzie's attitude is one of delight and playfulness in claiming her share of the visual world and her images are imbued with a freedom that comes with not seeing. "I'll hold my camera at arm's length, lay it on the ground, hold it overhead. I can be experimental because I don't see. Instead, I sense the light on my face. I hear the rustle of the wind in the trees or smell the fragrance of the flowers in the air, and I think I've really got to take this. People ask me how I compose my shots. [Laughs] Well, I don't."

In 2007, artist Alice Wingwall visited the Temple of Dendur accompanied by Rumba, her seeing eye dog. The Egyptian temple was dedicated circa 15 B.C. to Isis, patron of nature and magic. It is now housed in a soaring space with stippled glass walls and ceiling at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Alice sat with Rumba on the low bench along the east wall. Then she dispatched the dog out to visit the temple and shot a series of nineteen frames. In them, Rumba traverses the gleaming floor to the temple and returns to Alice. With this act and these photographs, Alice stakes her claim to the museum itself, to photography, and to visualization. She presents the full photo sequence as an enlarged proof sheet—a striped flag planted deep in the territory of visual art.

The needed breakthrough for blind artists is not just museum accessibility, but being exhibited with mainstream sighted artists on equal terms, says Wingwall. "We can all yell and scream about accessibility and all of this, but as artists we have to be doing good work. That's the basis of real change." 10

Meanwhile, blind photographer Pete Eckert has created his own art accessibility program and it focuses on his original passion—sculpture. "Here's my policy," he says, "if it's outside exposed to acid rain, snow, and pigeons, I'm going to touch it. I'm not disrespectful ever, simply very persistent. But if a museum has put a sculpture outside where the pigeons can shit on it, I'm willing to get arrested to touch it." 11 Over the years, Eckert has enacted this personal accessibility program at museums across the country, and it has led to some remarkable experiences. On the Capitol Mall in Washington D.C. he began touching the works at the Hirshhorn Museum's sculpture garden. Guards descended and escorted him inside where he deployed his polite persistence. Eventually, he found himself being escorted among the sculptures dotting the sunken garden by a personal guide—museum director Olga Viso. "Touch anything you like," she instructed. Eckert's favorite of the day was Auguste Rodin's Head of Sorrow, (1882; enlarged 1889-1904), a monumental bronze bust of a woman's upturned face, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. "As I was feeling it, running my fingers across that face, I could feel tears coming to my eyes. It was so powerful that I wept. And I could hear that other people watching were crying too. It was amazing. I can still see that sculpture." 12

Eckert does not view museums as repositories or treasure houses, but as research laboratories for artists. "Sighted people can research at will, but blind people cannot. That's why I am aggressive about getting access."

Eckert's point is critical. Improved accessibility leads to an obvious next step—increasingly sophisticated art production. That presumably produces heightened recognition. Exhibition exposure in mainstream venues is only one part of a moment of ferment and emergence for blind photographers. In the past decade, blind photographers have commenced workshops in Los Angeles, New York, Mexico City, Nicaragua, London, Edinburgh, Prague, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, and elsewhere. Documentary filmmakers in the United States, Spain, France, Mexico, and the Czech Republic have produced significant films on blindness and photography. And, of course, blind photographers of increasing sophistication and accomplishment have emerged around the world. Accessibility and inclusiveness for the sight-impaired is political. In the end, Sight Unseen is predicated on the most radical of inclusiveness: treating the work of blind artists with equality within the museum setting.