In today’s edition of the @wsj there’s an incredible article written by Susan R. Barry about eyesight. The piece focuses on Liam McCoy who, at the age of 15, underwent corrective surgery to give him the ability to see. As Barry articulates in the essay, when a blind person gains the ability to see later in life “the improvements [are] discombobulating. Surgery plunged Liam into a world of sharp lines and edges. While we all see lines at the boundaries of objects or shadows, we know where these lines belong. We recognize an object immediately—all of its parts combine together, instantly and effortlessly, into a single unit. But after a childhood of near-blindness, Liam did not recognize the lines as boundaries of known objects. Instead, he saw a tangled, fragmented world.”
This is where I enter the equation…
Remotrait Session with Aleksa Palladino
In my last post I described how I’ve begun to do remote photo shoots, via FaceTime. By hooking a projector up to my laptop while I’m on a call with my subjects— who are often not just in a different state but sometimes in a different country— I can project their face onto a backdrop in my studio. Then I shoot through a range of different materials and substances, throwing the subject slightly out of focus, which takes the focus off the poor video connection and puts it on the texture, helping sell the illusion that the subject was actually in my space. I’ve dubbed these portrait sessions “remotraits”…
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