Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

rrying on with my previous posts in thinking about seeing differently and changing perspectives, a talk that has never failed to inspire me is Professor John Hull on Blindness and Memory. Hull lost his sight in 1980 and has now spent the same amount of time without sight as he spent sighted. He talks about how his experience lead him to understand that vision is directly related to visual memory, and that loss of the former leads to loss of the latter. As his vision finally left he entered into a process of relearning and remapping his surroundings to see acoustically. As his vision finally left after a slow recline into blindness, Hull said:

‘I had not been a blind person; I had been a sighted person who couldn’t see. I began to enter into deep blindness. What I mean by that is that visual memory began to disappear.’

He begins to relate the disappearance of his visual memory to an imagined visit to the National Portrait Gallery in which during each visit, different portraits disappear and are left blank - no longer visible. The comparison of the memory to a framed object, much like the photograph, shows how Hull was relating his visual memory to ‘remembered’ portraits that speak more to traces of memory rather than real experiences. He reiterates this point when discussing the memory of his wife.

‘I found it hard to remember (his wife’s face) but there were certain photographs I could remember.’

When confronted with loss of memory, it’s interesting to think that our recall for photos stays longer than our memory of the real person or event. He ends his talk by discussing how his tactile memory has taken over his visual memory. If you have some spare time, I highly recommend watching the talk. It’s connections to how we process images in relation to our memories is a real eye opener. [vimeo video_id="61088287" width="1000" height="563“]