Writing with shadows

In the previous issue of Vedere Oltre, I talked about the origin of the Camera Chiara project, conceived by Dr. Davide Carlo Conte, who, in early 2023 brought four sight-impaired people into a darkroom to experiment with light, shadows, and photosensitive paper. They used rayography to compose images with objects placed on silver salt photo paper. The images created by the light of the enlarger were then scanned and printed on Minolta sheets, which, when heated, made reliefs of the parts in black. This final step allowed the participants to feel their creations.

I had high expectations for expanding the project, but after this first experience I hadn’t fully realized the importance of what we were doing. There was lots of feedback, and for some of the participants it was clear that, for various reasons, something had clicked. For one of them, the shadows had reawakened an old memory of when his residual vision allowed him to take normal photos. The strong contrast in the images he made with us in the darkroom allowed him to see what he had created. Rayography is almost exclusively the absence or presence of color on the print, with the borders sometimes jagged but always defined. So, for this participant, who describes his current perceptive state as “on the border between sight and touch,” Camera Chiara allowed him to relive, through a new language, a passion that he had necessarily abandoned when his residual vision decreased to three tenths.

Another member of the group, blind since the age of 15, discovered a new expressive means in this experience. She decided to use her time in the darkroom to look for symbolisms that represented her and that could be understood not only by her alone, but also by people who could see her works without touching them. As she says, “There is creativity even in visual impairments” and therefore the blind should not be excluded a priori.

Later, some of the works created in this first test session were chosen by architect Fabio Fornasari, who, in addition to curating the exhibit, offered his supervision to assure they would be suitably framed. At a meeting with Dr. Conte, the prints were presented to a small group of people in the art field and to the project’s sponsors. The works caught the attention of Simone Menegoi, artistic director of Arte Fiera, who gave the Institute a stand at the 2024 edition of Arte Fiera. It was an enormous success, and the project’s story and creative idea attracted hundreds of people to the stand. Some of them wanted to buy the works, which, unfortunately for them, weren’t for sale.

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