Visa pour l’image presents every year the work by the winners of World Press and the public rushes to see them. This year, World Press has created a new category “multimedia contest” of which the work of the awarded has only been shown on the web. Next year maybe…

“My name is Stefano da Luigi and I am presenting Bianco, a multimedia project on visual deficiencies”, he says with a smiling face, as appearing in my field of view reduced by the years. I’ve seen your cane, I couldn’t help but say hello! “ We are in Amsterdam on May 6th, 2011 and Stefano da Luigi is going to receive his second prize of “Multimedia contest”.

Over fifteen years, I’ve taken into consideration my personal view, I have then seen many photo works on visual deficiencies. Nothing shocking: I was a photographer, a picture-editor, head of a photo agency and I suffer from ambylopia! I am what in English we call a visually impaired man, and quite inaccurately in French “malvoyant”! I have a tubular vision, a field of view with a 10° angle, that allows me to see photographs and take them with my old Leica M2. It is the consequence of a genetic degenerative process of the retina that in the actual state of medicine, drives inexorably but slowly to blindness.
“This subject is then blindness, accidental or pathological”, he writes in the magnificent book Bianco by Stefano da Luigi (Ed. Trolley book 2010) Phillippe Dagen, famous art critic in Le Monde. “What can be written, what to think on blindness that might make some sense? Without a doubt, as a superstition: a man that spends his life watching (people, photographs, paintings, sculptures, what we call art and what we call reality) finds himself incapable of facing the idea of blindness as the latter would deprive if not everything, at least what for him is essential in his life. There are diseases that we might imagine suffering, privations to the probability that time helps to get oneself used to. But this is not applicable to blindness.”

I understand Phillippe Dagen more, as I’ve been able to notice the fear that generates blindness in the world of visual. A while after I’ve accepted, out of security, to hold a cane, by then white, the photographer Claude Raymond Dityvon was exposing in Paris. When he saw me “as blind”, he couldn’t keep his emotion, and his watered eyes were the first ones to greet me. Pointless to explain my own feelings…

And yet I must deny these emotional comments from the world of the “bien voyants” (good sighted) that only recall one part of the reality of the visually impaired. A reality difficult to approach being so multiple. The common element between all the people shot by Stefano da Luigi is blindness, present or menacing, but the feel of the blindness of a Chinese, an American, an African or a European will be different depending on the impact of the disability, the culture, the religion, and naturally, the social position.

“When the surgeon announced to me with a catastrophic tone that he had succeeded to remove a brain tumor, but that I had become blind, my answer astounded him. I said that it was not serious because I was alive!” the comic Bruno Netter confided to me a few years before, always very active with his “Compagnie du 3ème Oeil” (Company of the third eye). And to be complete, I must state that through the discussion groups between visually impaired persons, I’ve realized that among this population many of them had a profession linked to the visual! Without forgetting the confidences made by many photographers on the state of their vision. One of our best colorists had told me one night after having a few drinks that he was color blind! It cannot be ignored that a painter like Degas was visually impaired as we can read with interest in The eyes of the painters (Ed. L’ âge d’homme) by Doctor Lanthony.

The work of a photographer, particularly the photojournalist is to translate reality, not to interpret it, that is why the vision distortions seem so unacceptable in the photographic domain. We forget that no one knows what the other really sees!

“Truth be told, these portraits are almost unbearable”, continues Philippe Dagen on Stefano da Luigi’s work. “Those portrayed will never see the pictures, and those who watch them cannot place themselves mentally in the situation of the ‘models’, even if we challenge the accuracy of the term. The look of the viewer hasn’t any other object but the absence of the regard of the blind. It has only to see just what is not to be seen. It’s necessary to examine his eyes, or just their eye-socket that no image has ever passed through. The more the photograph is clear and luminous, as we watch it we realize the fact that being able to examine the picture is in itself a privilege that we could not enjoy, even from our birth. Each image becomes a warning or a menace. It shows how powerful they are.” This view of the “good sighted” on the work by Stefano da Luigi is not mine, as it lays on a false principle: blind people don’t have a regard.

In reality the regard is not vision. Blind and visually impaired people have regards on the world, particular views of course, but real views. When I was told ten years ago that an Argentinean photographer gave photography classes to blind people, I immediately wanted to see the results of their works. Their photographs were just like Mr. Everybody, save for a few that showed a particular quality, a certain regard, as we say.

Since then, these experiences have multiplied always with the same finding: good and bad images, as in any photoclub! Sometimes it is forgotten that photography is just an instant captured by the eye, but a moment that is analyzed by the brain. The difference between “pressing a button” and a photographer is there, in their brains!

What has literally deeply moved me in the work by Stefano da Luigi is not this “warning” that Phillipe Dagen refers to, as I experience it everyday. No, what shocked me is the effort of the photographer to understand the regard of blind and visually impaired people. Bianco is the result of a work of the eyes, the brain and the heart.

As it is not simple for a photographer to “shoot” a visually impaired person or a person with an “extraordinary” vision. Stefano da Luigi has succeeded, without shortcuts, in giving different visions of our particular views, without the depressing voyeurism and mercy of many photographers. Stefano da Luigi has worked long enough on the subject, as he has done for many others. This contributor of Agence VII “loves to invade the backstage of images” i.e., in the privacy of his subject. He has understood that we, blind or visually impaired people, have as well a view. He made portraits of views. And it is all of his values.

Michel Puech

The Italian photographer, contributor of Agence VII and living in Milan, studied in the Roma Photo institute. After being interested in the fashion universe, he began working in the porn industry around the world. His book “Pornoland” translated in English, French and Italian has received the prize Marco Bastianelli in 2005. “Blindness” is a voyage to the heart of blindness, in hospitals and schools in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. “Cinema Mundi” is an exploration of the alternative film studios, far from the Hollywood machine, in China, Russia, Iran, Korea… Vivid colors, intense faces, unusual decors, these Fine Arts photographs bring to mind the material of the engraving, playing with the idea of real and unreal. For this project, launched in 2006 that has always been nourished, Stefano da Luigi has received in 2008 Word Press award under the category “Art & Entertainment”.