On their Blindness
I started as a volunteer in a daily center for people that had become blind : it was when I realized that (for me)to become blind was the worst thing that could ever happen to someone.
I was fascinated, obsessed by them, by their strength (to tolerate their lives without the chance to see the world) and their fragility.
They suffer such a painful lack and yet decide to keep going: all of them have different ways to do it, but their power is always a great example for me.
Blindness was described as a violence they suffered and that change their life: they lost something and from my point of view they gained something else, a subtle and deep power to understand the world, going straight to the depth of things, people and situations.
It seems like they don’t need anymore to see how things look like externally when they can feel how they are inside, they go straight to the point cause they’re walking on shortcuts that take them to the souls of things.
They left concepts as beauty and ugliness going back to an innocent “good or bad” principle because they had to start trusting people to the deepest, to trust completely in others without any reserve.
I spent months in this small center that helps them keep going without the most important sense:this where they are taught how to read braille, how to use a cane, how to orientate and other basic stuffs.
I focused on people that already have learned these things and want to keep living not as a blind person but as human beings.
We went out for dinners, we trained in the gym, we learned how to dance tango,how to paint and how to grow vegetables, we even went to the dark room together (this project was all shoot on films that I scanned)
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This project will be continued during the next months as a personal need: I had the chance to meet people that were mountains to me and that carried away most of my terrifying fear about becoming blind, they taught me how the world could be lived and understood even without seeing it.
Alessandro Treves
http://www.alessandrotreves.com
