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Blind power / See without looking.
Blind photography, blind and photography.


I have long observed these advances in "wooden tongues" which juggle, virtuosically with words emptied of their meaning, languages ​​as pasty as they have spun, soft as precise. It is an army of wooden tongues wanting to parasitize our thoughts, supported by the constant attacks of this Orwellian “newspeak” in full apogee, all drowned in a “technological” context which pushes to systematically destroy words as we know them : receptacles of concepts.
The war is total, in the eyes of all, and the troops who go up to the front with the flower on the smartphone keep on marching, sometimes singing some absurd tunes. The bunker had already crumbled under the continuous waves of attacks, buried under preconceived ideas, loads of hollow-headed stereotypes.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

And even though it had been razed once and again, it continued to be bombarded daily. Why is it so fierce if it is just a word? a simple word or, precisely, a word which calls to go to the simple ... ”fatal error” or “Heliane damage”, this word has right to a constant stoning. Yet drowned among so many others, he has the “privilege” of counting with a gigantic tombstone covering him, of these colossal monuments shining too much in the sun, polished by each hand caressing him in passing, each breath of those who came to see and went away looking.

So here they are: underground, the “sight”, that impossible tooth to be pulled out, lying buried under the weight of the “gaze”. The deception had been smoothly carried out and in the rusty loudspeakers sizzled a monotonous voice which incited everyone to repeat: ”look! especially look! watch as there is nothing more to see ... " All this to try to put an end to it, once and for all, with this jar, a pandora's box created and then opened one day, some 2300 years ago, by a certain Plato, who had committed the mistake of defining a single word in a sense “unsuitable” for our beloved society, that of “modern times” ...
What had he done by saying this in essence? : “See: who knows, who knows”. The current axiom is however clear: "a blind man cannot see", period. Because if it is “at first sight” only a “simple history of words”, considering that these have to do with knowledge, things get complicated beyond the spheres of language: in the concrete and daily life where we are harassed with each syllable that: "there is nothing more to see beyond the eyes" and that "the evidence" is not only conventional form but also background of this "reality" our.


A clever trick that a group of blind people, camera in hand, can ridicule ... Because the "normal" people who bet everything on the gaze forget to "see", the blind , they, deprived of this sensory trap have a privileged access to a knowledge that we abandon, often for convenience. Where we barely look, they see better ... simple and logically.
The initial axiom, this block of granite planted in the rocks of our certainties then loses its weight and ends up floating in a space of uncertainty, a more global framework where it no longer means anything. But would a society of generalized blindness, stricto sensu, want busy citizens to wander beyond the look they are supposed to have on their own life? They would become little controllable, little "disciplined", even disobedient "to all these certainties engraved in black letters on the steles of" knowledge ", this machine to frame ideas, minds and consciences.

“Get in sight! Long live the look! ” as with every currency in each country, it is the currency that betrays our worst weakness, these chains that keep us in the perpetual construction of a false ego, the whole attention focused on our navel, empty and mute.

The idea of ​​teaching photography to blind people was born from a multiple collision on the highway of a wandering spirit ... from a report on blind people playing football, old memories of philosophy, a certain Eugene Bacvar, of an “archaeological” obsession with discovering ruins or a secret passage on a hidden temple, that of a “reality behind reality”, which I only had as a detector with a lugged camera in a distant and "exotic" continent ... Suddenly everything fell into place and, based only on a brief feeling, an intuition, I found myself "infiltrated" in a rehabilitation center for the blind, with as plan to teach them my office.

The look usurping the function of sight, it was no longer there, I insist, that a simple matter of words, but indeed an organization of the world: in ours, these blind people often connected to rank of everyday “circus beasts”, often beggars, here for example, with no social path on the horizon, ultimately came to be reduced to simple “potiches”, decorative elements of these streets “So picturesque” of the Bolivian reality sold to tourist stereotypes.
What then appeared as a possibility after the workshop was in another “style”: blind people, far more able to connect with a larger and more comprehensive “reality”, could, in a “mixed” system between photographers blind, “without eyes” and “normal”, “with eyes”, take us by the hand and produce reports that are also “mixed”, images that call us to distance ourselves, to look for other points of ... view.

These blind people could have gone from occasional beggars to full-fledged reporters, with a salary, a higher standard of living, independent, pleasant, while bringing to the rest of the population a light on our world which, paradoxically, is a little like certain particles in quantum physics: it is a torch which only lights up in the absence of observation.
“Everyone” could have won ...

The workshop lasted around a year and for each problem encountered, a simple, always simple solution had to be found. Until the day when we could finally say, proofs in hand, printed on photo paper, that yes, there is indeed a chasm between sight and gaze, that yes, there is indeed a “reality” behind the “Reality”, just like there is a whole world behind a television in a living room ...
Months of training, perfecting a sketch of an applicable “method” or by anyone, “universal”, because simple, then other months roamed the streets applying and correcting the method, pointing always simple, then finally the results: a photographic exhibition at the Alliance française in La Paz. The first eddies were linked to the panic caused in the minds by the news of “sighted blind people”, exposed supporting evidence, taken in fraganti by this verisimilitude of the imago, this funerary mask of the ignorance revealed, puzzled, petrified with crystals of silver salts, this linguistic “attack”.

But it was very little knowing the dynamics of fluids which agitates humanity because if the eddies should have been heralds of a coastal surge, of a backdrop in daily consciousnesses, it was without counting on the solid dogmatic dikes deeply planted in the sand of these beaches that we call collective consciousness ...
The flow was therefore stemmed, channeled, its force diverted and discharged into the rancid waters of the anecdotal. After the first impact, the tide went out without rising. Their images, these few starfish strewn on the sand, were in turn engulfed a little further out ... they were all gone ... all for nothing. All that remained were jellyfish drying in the sun, and that foul smell of wax masks melting in the heat, these masks abandoned in the aisle by the whole denomination “society of the spectacle” ... of a poor and pathetic work of theater where the only actors still in office were two three seagulls laughing at the passage of the poor guy sitting there, feet buried in a sand still wet, this only memory of a wave that was not, humidity at most due to remains of water fell from the clouds where he too often had his head ... The look had won again ....

And if in the surrounding “society”, once past the astonishment then the fear which made them turn their back with great haste, in the ranks of the blind was also the stampede in front of the new fight to fight: to set up a press agency mixed: “with and without eyes'. The first to desert clearly announced the color of the bottom of her eyes burned by a cold sun: "mister, a blind man who takes photos, it is bad, it is evil ..." I did not even not wanted to look at her back when she walked away: I saw it only too well. It was all said: a bitter and final failure. “Ni modo” ...

The tombstone of the gaze fell with all its weight on the ruins of sight and the axiom in gold letters was increased by a few words: "a blind man does not see ... it is even a blind man". ..


Christian Lombardi /

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