Musée de la Photographie

What can be more terrifying for a person than to lose their sight. Seeing makes it possible to appreciate forms and colours, to situate oneself and move around in space, to recognise others and recognise oneself.
In our clear-sighted society, the focus is on image. It almost conditions our entire existence. The sense of sight is pre-eminent and imposes its truth, for as the expression says: “seeing is believing”. And yet, an image does not have the power alone to make us see the world, it can also summon our other senses.

The Blind Photo project, led by the Museum of Photography jointly with the Les Amis des Aveugles (Friends of the Blind) from Ghlin, enables us to understand that the visually-impaired person approaches photography with the help of all their senses.
The adventure began in 2015 when the Museum set itself the challenge of making photography – a quintessentially visual medium - accessible to the visually impaired. The first stage was to set up mechanisms to make the reading of the photographic image multisensorial. The mediation department then went farther by adapting the discovery by the photographic laboratory.

In March 2019, there was a further step forward when a few visually-impaired and blind persons took over the camera, transcending all the prejudices in this way. The result of this experience accompanied by the photographic eye of Boris Spiers: twenty-five photographs produced and chosen by Adeline, Françoise, Isabelle and Laurence. From the cane to the dogs guiding them in their everyday movements, from the tactile reference marks to the rustling air and trickling water enabling them to build an image of the world, these women share their testimony of a wonderful human adventure for all to see, whether they are sighted or not.