06 11: 41 am page 1 The Disability

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the assumption that blind people (whatever the level of visual impairment) have no idea of quantifi able

physical reality and would, of course, think that the sound really was of a yapping dog waking up in

bed. His joke reveals his disability (un-) consciousness, not hers.

But she responds to this with laughter, she joins in. So, he further objectifi es her by again distancing

himself. While she laughs along with his imitations, he secretly photographs her, because her laugh-

ing but blind face was “so beautiful.” Clearly, because she is laughing in his pictures, he presumably

continued his imitations while he photographed her. Th

e game for two turned into manipulation by

one. Th

e pictures show her leaning against the dark wooden surround of the door. She is framed by

this and leans into this frame by pressing her ears to his mimicry. She is kept at a distance and keeps

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David Hevey

376

her responses on that surface of the mosquito net which fi ts into the wooden frame. Th

is framing of

her by the door is copied in his framing of her in the camera. Out of the fi ve pictures in the sequence,

four clearly show her eyes. Technically, these have been deliberately whitened in the printing to

highlight the blindness.

As labour is the anchor in the other series, and as narcissism is the anchor in his self-image series,

shooting the whites of her eyes is the anchor in this series. Her blindness is the symbol of innocence

and nobility. Her blindness is the anchor of her simplicity. Her blindness is the object of his voyeur-

ism. He has taken and symbolised this disabled person’s image, which he says “she will never see” (he

obviously didn’t consider aural description), as the anchor and beauty of naturalism. Th

e text which

accompanies this series of images doesn’t quite have the once-upon-a-time-ness of some of the other

photo-essays, but it still serves to push the imagery into the magical or metaphysical. Th

e always-to-

be natural images of the blind girl are the only set that have no signifi cant time element to them. His

work with the cowman spans days, his work with the wood-cutter is over a period of time (enough for

the wood-cutter to give an opinion of the fi nished prints), but the work with the blind girl of beauty

and innocence needs saying once, because it is forever. Again, like Th

e Family of Man, like Arbus and

Winogrand, Mohr has chosen to absent both the three-dimensional disabled person and their social

story because it is incongruous to their own disability (un) consciousness. Th

eir images tell us nothing

about the actual lives of disabled people, but they add to the history of oppressive representation.

I have just analysed a random selection of four major photographic books, only one of which I knew

to have been involved in disability representation. In the event, all four were. In the fi nal analysis, these

books which include disabled people in their fi eld of photographic reference do so on the condition

that disabled people are, to use Sontag’s term for Diane Arbus’s work, “borderline” cases. Sontag meant

this term in its common reference to psychic or spiritual disorder. However, disabled people in the

representations which I have discussed in this and the previous chapters share a commonality in that

they live in diff erent camps beyond the border. Whether beauty or the beast, they are outsiders. Th

basis for this border in society is real. It is physical and it is called segregation. Th

e social absence of

disabled people creates a vacuum in which the visual meanings attributable (symbolically, metaphori-

cally, psychically, etc.) to impairment and disablement appear free-fl oating and devoid of any actual

people. In the absence of disabled people, the meaning in the disabled person and their body is made

by those who survey. Th

ey attempt to shift the disablement on to the impairment, and the impairment

into a fl aw. Th

e very absence of disabled people in positions of power and representation deepens

the use of this “fl aw” in their images. Th

e repression of disabled people makes it more likely that the

symbolic use of disablement by non-disabled people is a sinister or mythologist one. Disablement

re-enters the social world through photographic representation, but in the re-entry its meaning is tied

not by the observed, disabled people, but by the non-disabled observers.

It is here that all the work, picked at random, is linked. Disabled people, in these photographic rep-

resentations, are positioned either as meaningful or meaningless bodies. Th

ey are meaningful only as

polarised anchors of naturalist humility or psychic terror. Brave but tragic: two sides of the segregated

coin? Disabled people are taken into the themes pursued by Arbus, Winogrand, Mohr, and so on, to

illustrate the truth of their respective grand narratives. Th

e role of the body of the disabled person is to

enfl esh the thesis or theme of the photographer’s work, despite the fact that most of the photographers

had taken no conscious decision to work “on” disability. It is as if the spirit of the photographer’s mis-

sion can be summed up in their manipulation of a disabled person’s image. “Th

e disabled” emerge,

like a lost tribe, to fulfi l a role for these photographers but not for themselves.

Disabled people appeared either as one image at a time per book or one role per book. Th

e use

of disabled people is the anchor of the weird, that is, the fear within. Th

ey are used as the symbol

of enfreakment or the surrealism of all society. “Reactionary” users of this notion hunt the “crips”

down to validate chaos within their own environment (Arbus); “progressive” users of this notion hunt

them down within their own environment to fi nd an essential romantic humanity in their own lives

(but no question of access). Th

e US “crip” symbol denotes alienation. Th

e impaired body is the site

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377

The Enfreakment of Photography

and symbol of all alienation. It is psychic alienation made physical. Th

e “contorted” body is the fi nal

process and statement of a painful mind.

While this symbol functions as a “property” of disabled people as viewed by these photographers,

it does not function as the property of those disabled people observed. Its purpose was not as a role

model, or as references for observed people, but as the voyeuristic property of the non-disabled gaze.

Moreover, the impairment of the disabled person became the mark, the target for a disavowal, a rid-

ding, of the existential fears and fantasies of non-disabled people. Th

is “symbolic” use of disablement

knows no classic political lines, indeed it may be said to become more oppressive the further left you

move.

20

Th

e point is clear. If the disability paradox, the disability dialectic, is between impaired people

and disabling social conditions, then the photographers we have just examined represent the construc-

tion of an “offi

cial” history of blame from the disabling society towards disabled people.

e works were selected at random and I fear their randomness proves my point. Wherever I

drilled, I would have found the same substance. Were I to continue through modern photographic

publications, I have no doubt that the pattern I am describing would continue; the only variation being

that some would use disabled people for the purposes described, while others would absent disabled

people altogether. A cursory widening of the list, to glance at photographers who have come aft er

those named above, people like Joel-Peter Witkin,

Gene Lambert,

Bernard F. Stehle,

Nicholas

Nixon,

and others who have all “dealt with” disablement, shows photographers who continued a

manipulation of the disability/impairment image but have done so in a manner which depressingly

makes the work by, say, Arbus and Mohr (I don’t suppose they ever felt they’d be mentioned in the

same breath!) seem positively timid! Th

e work of many of the “post New Documentaries” has shift ed

the ground on the representation of disabled people by making “them” an even more separate cat-

egory. While the volume of representation is higher, the categorisation, control and manipulation have

become deeper. In this sense, the photographic observation of disablement has increasingly become

the art of categorisation and surveillance. Also, from a psychological viewpoint, those that appear to

have transgressed this commodifi cation of disabled people have only transgressed their own fears of

their constructions. Th

e oppression remains the same. Th

e segregated are not being integrated, they

are being broken into! Th

e photographic construction of disabled people continues through the use

of disabled people in imagery as the site of fear, loss or pity. Th

ose who are prevented by their liberal

instincts from “coming out” in their cripple-as-freak, freak-as-warning-of-chaos, circumvent it by

attempting to tell the unreconstructed “natural” story of oblivion. Either way, it is a no-win victim

position for disabled people within those forms of representation. My intention in this essay is to

suggest new forms.

A fi nal note of hope. Diane Arbus was “extremely upset” when she received a reply from “Th

Little People’s Convention” to her request to photograph them. Th

ey wrote that, “We have our own

little person to photograph us.”

In terms of disabled people’s empowerment, this is the single most

important statement in all of the work considered.

Notes

1. Vic Finkelstein has argued that the “administrative model” of disablement has replaced the “medical model” to the

extent that it is now the dominant oppressive one. Th

is model, according to Finkelstein, suggests that the move away

from the large “phase-two” institutions (which mirrored heavy industrial production) towards the dispersal of “care in

the community” has meant that disablement has shift ed from a predominantly cure-or-care issue to an administrative

one. Th

ere is no doubt in my mind that this shift is being echoed in the production of “positive” images within the UK

local authorities. Th

ey are similar to the functionalist images of the charities third-stage imagery in their portrayal of the

administration of service provision to (grinning) disabled people.

2. GYN/ecology (1981), by Mary Daly, London: Women’s Press.

3. Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images (1987), ed. Alan Gartner and Tom Joe, New York: Praeger.

4. Th

e Family of Man, exhibition and publication by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955. (Reprinted 1983.)

5. diane arbus (1990), London: Bloomsbury Press.

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378

6. On Photography (1979), by Susan Sontag, London: Penguin.

7. “Arbus revisited: a review of the monograph,” by Paul Wombell, Portfolio magazine, no. 10, Spring 1991.

8. Ibid., p. 33.

9. diane arbus, op. cit., p. 23. Th

e full title of the photograph is Mexican Dwarf in his Hotel Room in N.Y.C. 1970.

10. diane arbus, op. cit., p. 16. Th

e full title for this photograph is: Russian Midget Friends in a Living Room on 100th St. N.Y.C.

1963.

11. Th

e death cry of Kurtz on discovering the unpronounceable, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

12. Diane Arbus: A Biography (1984), by Patricia Bosworth, New York: Avon Books, p. 226.

13. It is important to remember that the ability of naturalist photographic practice to “enfreak” its subject is not peculiar to

the oppressive portrayal of disabled people. For example, the same process of fragmenting and reconstructing oppressed

people into the projection of the photographer is particularly marked in the projection of the working classes. See Brit-

ish Photography from the Th

atcher Years (book and exhibition) by Susan Kismaric, Museum of Modern Art, New York,

1990.

14. Diane Arbus: A Biography, op. cit., p. 227.

15. Ibid., p. 153.

16. Gary Winogrand (1988), Figments from the Real World, ed. John Szarkowski, New York: Museum of Modern Art.

17. Th

e End of Art Th

eory: Criticism and Post-Modernity (1986), by Victor Burgin, London: Macmillan, p. 63.

18. Another Way of Telling (1982), by John Berger and Jean Mohr, London: Writers and Readers.

19. Ibid., p. 11.

20. For the “left ” use of disability/impairment as the site of a defense of the welfare state, see “Bath time at St. Lawrence”

by Raissa Page in Ten-8, nos. 7/8, 1982. Alternatively, for a cross-section of the inclusion of disability imagery within

magazines servicing the welfare state, see the King’s Fund Centre reference library, London. Finally, see the impairment

charity house journals and read the photo credits, i.e., the Spastics Society’s Disability Now. Network, Format, Report

and other left photo agencies regularly supply uncritical impairment imagery.

21. Masterpieces of Medical Photography: Selections from the Burns Archive (1987), ed. Joel-Peter Witkin, California: Twelve-

tree Press.

22. Work from a Darkroom (1985), by Gene Lambert (exhibition and publication), Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery.

23. Incurably Romantic (1985), by Bernard F. Stehle, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

24. Pictures of People (1988), by Nicholas Nixon, New York: Museum of Modern Art.

25. Diane Arbus: A Biography (1984), by Patricia Bosworth, New York: Avon Books, p. 365.

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379

Blindness and Art

Nicholas Mirzoeff

Derrida’s philosophical investigation of blindness leaves many questions to be answered by art his-

torians. Blindness was and remains a central metaphor in Western art, representing and permitting

insight and understanding for the artist, gendered male, over his “female” subject-matter. Here it now

seems to suggest that visual representation is the outcome of an interplay between the metaphor of

insight and the physiological structures of sight. Following Derrida’s provocative comments, I shall

now re-examine the canon of the blind and blindness from Poussin via David, Ingres and Delacroix

to Paul Strand and Robert Morris. Given the force attached by Merleau-Ponty and Derrida to the

physiology of seeing, I shall consider blindness not just as a metaphor but as a condition. For Derrida

himself stands within a historical construction of blindness as insight, which is not natural but is less

than two hundred years old now. How did depictions of blindness change in accord with changing

notions of sight and blindness? In what ways is the metaphor of blindness aff ected by these changes?

And what becomes of the Classical body that is known not through insight metaphorized as blindness

but through insight enabled by blindness?

In France the modern period is held to begin with the reign of Louis XIV (1648–1715). For art

history, this period marks the foundation of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture and the begin-

nings of public debate over the nature and accomplishments of art. One central moment in this history

came in 1666 when Louis ordered that the Academy should hold conferences on works of art for the

edifi cation of an audience composed of their peers, students and, occasionally, government ministers.

e Seventh conference was given by the artist Sébastien Bourdon, who chose a painting by Nicolas

Poussin (1593–1665), Christ Healing the Blind at Jericho (1651), as the springboard for his discussion

of light, for Poussin was regarded as the greatest artist of the French school. He emphasized that Pous-

sin had chosen to represent an early morning scene, which cast a strong blue light from the left side

of the canvas. Bourdon elaborated upon the advantages of such morning light, which later became

so conventional that only the angled fall of light from the left was retained. Bourdon, however, read

Poussin’s painting as a treatise on luminosity:

For though all the Parts retain their true Teints, yet the Shade which passes above them, is as it were

a Veil to extinguish their Vivacity, and hinder their having so much strength as to fi ll the View, and

thrust out other Objects more considerable, and on which the Painter has laid greater Stress. But in

return, he has not failed to fi ll those Places with Light where he saw it would not hurt the beauty of

the Figures. (Bourdon 1740: 132)

His audience, however, were not satisfi ed with such subtleties and demanded to know where the

multitude of witnesses described in the New Testament had gone in Poussin’s painting. Bourdon

replied that

We cannot suppose that all the Multitude who followed Christ could be about him at once, and being

some steps from him, they were concealed by the Buildings. Th

at there are Witnesses enough of the

Action, since by that person cloathed in Red, who appears surprised, the Painter has represented the

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380

Astonishment of the Jews; and by him who is looking very near, he shews the desire that Nation had

to see Miracles wrought. A greater Number of Figures would only have occasioned Confusion, and

hindered those of Christ and the blind Men from being seen so distinctly. (145)

is literal reading of the painting belied what now seem to be the obvious metaphorical connota-

tions of the painting, connecting the blindness of the fi gures to the light being spread by Christ. Just

as the king could heal by his touch, one might argue, so could artists bring vision into being by their

brushstrokes. In this view, the royal artists of the Academy could then claim connection to the sacred

person of the king and imbibe something of his divine essence from his aura. Bourdon, however, also

insisted on a literal interpretation of blindness:

By the Action of the fi rst blind Man, his Faith and Confi dence in him who is touching him is expressed;

in the second, the Favour he is asking is likewise shown. It is common for Persons who are deprived

of any one of the fi ve Senses to have the rest better and more subtle; because the Spirits which move in

them, to make them known what they want, move with greater force having fewer Offi

ces to perform;

thus they who have lost their Sight, have a more acute Hearing, and a more sensible Touch. Th

is is

what Mr Poussin has intended to express in the last blind Man, and in which he has wonderfully suc-

ceeded. For by his Face and his Arms one may know he is all Attention to the Voice of the Saviour,

and endeavoring to fi nd him out. Th

is attentive hearkening appears in his Forehead, which is not quite

smooth; the Skin and all the other Parts of which are drawn up. He likewise discovers it, by suspending

all the Motions of his Countenance, which continue in that Posture to give time to his Ear to listen

more attentively, and that he may not be diverted. (164)

Bourdon thus used the new insights of Cartesian science to explain that the blind have sharper hearing

than the average person, a myth that has long out-lasted the medical theory of the spirits from which

it was devised (as the body has a fi nite number of spirits to enable the senses, the loss of one sense

leaves more spirits available for the others and they are thus enhanced). In fact, the blindness which

is on the verge of being cured in Poussin’s image calls attention, then, not to insight but to the human

voice. Bourdon read the rhetoric of Poussin’s painting through physical blindness and found it the

key to the expression of the “Voice of the Saviour.” He envisaged blindness as a means of intensifying

the tactile and auditory response to the painting, rather than as a signifi er of incapacity. Light had to

be arranged by the painter in such a way as to prevent illegibility, creating a balanced visual economy,

which Bourdon described as “a fi ne Oeconomy of Colours and Lights . . . which make an agreeable

Concert and Charming Sweetness that never cloys the Sight” (170).

e mute painter’s achievement was like that of the blind in calling a sensible world into being,

while deprived of certain sensory tools. For just as there is a moment of blindness inherent in the

act of visual representation, the resulting image was inevitably silent. Th

roughout the ancien régime,

artists turned to the gestural sign language of the deaf as a means of overcoming this defi ciency for,

as the French writer du Fresnoy put it:

Mutes have no other way of speaking (or expressing their thoughts) but only by their gesture and their

actions, ’tis certain that they do it in a manner more expressive than those who have the use of Speech,

for which reason the Picture, which is mute ought to imitate them, so as to make itself understood.

(Dryden 1695 [1648]: 129)

e mute picture required the assistance of the deaf in order to signify. For in the early modern pe-

riod, the simple binary opposition between the able-bodied and the disabled did not exist. Instead,

the human body was perceived as inevitably imperfect, each person having certain skills that others

might not possess. Even Louis XIV had regular bleedings and purgatives before any unusual or tiring

activity to purify his body. If the sacred body of the Sun King could be considered imperfect, then

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