It is late August, and I’m standing in the beautiful Place de la Concorde in Paris trying to plug an Ethernet cable into my camera. The sun is bright, and I can feel the excitement of the crowd buzzing around me.
My hands start to shake as I fumble with the cord. I try to make out the color on the light indicator: green means it’s working, red means there’s a problem to troubleshoot. But at first there is no light — or at least not that I can see. It takes me a few minutes to adjust, and then I begin taking photos.
I am a journalism student at the University of Georgia, and I have traveled to Paris to photograph the Summer Paralympics. As a college student on assignment 4,000 miles from home, I knew the experience would be challenging, but my learning curve is steeper than for most.
I was born with albinism, a genetic condition characterized by a lack of pigment in the body. Without pigment, the retina doesn’t develop properly, leading to visual impairment. So as a result of my condition, I am legally blind.
As you might imagine, photojournalism was not an obvious path for me. A blind photographer — it almost sounds like an oxymoron. How could someone whose entire life has been shaped by what I can’t see work in a visual medium?
My interest in photography started when I was 11. That was the year I got my first cellphone, and I began using it to snap pictures of things I had trouble seeing.
Many people assume blindness is complete darkness, but in reality, it is a spectrum; 85 percent of legally blind people have some vision. Many of us can see shapes, shadows and some colors. The quality of sight varies from person to person, but in my case, I can only see details within about 20 feet from me. If it were a photo, my vision would be out of focus and overexposed.
As a child, I began using my phone to snap pictures of things I had trouble seeing. Whenever something was too far away, or too small for me to make out, I would simply take a photo of it and then enlarge the picture in the palm of my hand until it was legible.
At first, my camera roll was full of photos of everyday things — my classroom whiteboard, pages from my history textbooks, restaurant menus — but over time I became interested in other facets of the visual world.
My camera was able to show me all the things my eyes couldn’t, and I began to hunt for things to photograph — cool shadows, interesting angles, repeating colors. On weekends, I would beg my dad to drive me into Atlanta so I could find more things to capture.
Later, when I got my first good digital camera, I would wander through my childhood home on a quest for details. I photographed the morning light streaming through the dining room window, the scratches and grooves in old wooden furniture. I was amazed at the intricacy and clarity of the world I saw through my viewfinder. I found beauty and imperfections everywhere.
Growing up, my father never questioned how his blind daughter could be interested in photography, so I never questioned it myself. But when I applied to study photojournalism, that shifted. In college, people had a hard time understanding how to handle a blind person in a visually dominated space. I received a lot of skeptical questions, and I began questioning myself, too. Impostor syndrome crept in.
I liked the photos I took, but were my photos good for a blind girl, or were they good?
Navigating the world is far more time-consuming for me than it is for a sighted person, and photojournalism is no exception. Finding my way around new environments requires creativity and patience. I sometimes have to ask strangers for directions to landmarks that are right in front of me, and negotiating the equipment can be a challenge: so many tiny buttons! (In the battle between blind girl and tiny buttons, tiny buttons undoubtedly have the advantage.)
But I’ve developed my own system for shooting. If I have trouble focusing a photo through the viewfinder, I use multiple different settings until I get the hang of it. And I’ve learned to embrace my unique process and perspective as an asset in my work.
