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Miss Blindsight
When noted photographer and sculptor Alice Wingwall began losing her sight, she became determined to continue making visual art. Now almost completely blind, Wingwall remains a vital visual artist, making lyrical and poignant photo-based works and installations that often express her experience of being without sight.
Wingwall suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary degenerative disease of the eye. After all but losing her perception of light a number of years ago, Wingwall discovered that a great deal of her experience of vision happens in her mind. The brain is capable of representing line, color and perspective even without the help of eyesight.
She rarely photographs all alone -- she asks colleagues, including her husband, architect Donlyn Lyndon, to look through her lens and describe what they see. During this collaborative process, she describes her "mind's eye" image and asks if the camera captures this view, using her deep store of memory for other comparison points.
Along with her memory, Wingwall relies to a great degree on her other senses in making her photographs.
She may feel the heat of the sun in order to get a sense of the strength and direction of the light source, and she may similarly sense the reflected light radiating from her subject.
Wingwall often uses auto-focus cameras to capture images. In addition, she uses an array of lenses intended to capture her failing sight. Although a 50-millimeter lens renders an image close to what the human eye sees, Wingwall is fond of using wider lenses and panoramic cameras that warp the image and represent her newfound inner vision of the world.
Several of Wingwall's photographs deal with her experience of working as a visual artist without the aid of sight. Many of her works feature architecture -- one of her favorite subjects -- superimposed with images of her guide dog, Slater, or his predecessor, Joseph. These images highlight the ways in which her negotiation of the world around her is now mediated through another being, and the intimate relationship that that establishes between her and her dogs.
She co-directed a film with Wendy Snyder MacNeil titled "Miss BlindSight/The Wingwall Auditions," which won Best Independent Film at the 25th anniversary New England Film and Video Festival.
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Overdog Mango
In 2006 Walter Kitundu and Alice Wingwall during their residencies at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. We created “Overdog Mango,” prompted by the Canis Major constellation and in honor of Alice's guide dogs.
We projected Alice's photographs through a "celestial disc" that rotated once every 15 minutes causing constellations of braille words to rise and set throughout the installation.
The disc was backed by an enormous concave mirror that shifted the light and changed its direction contributing to the complexity of the piece.
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Shoulder the Lion
SHOULDER THE LION is a visually stunning "unusual sensorial experience" called by many critics a "masterpiece" that "has opened the doors for artistic cinematic storytelling in the documentary format for many years to come."
Enter the worlds of three artists who have lost a sense defining their art. Alice Wingwall, a blind photographer residing in Sonoma county, examines if images still have power in our visually-saturated world. Graham Sharpe, a musician forced to give up his dream of playing music due to advancing hearing loss, is putting together an awards winning music festival in Ireland. As the noise worsens, new songs keep filling his inner ear, but will it only be him who can hear it in the end? Relive the story of a painter/sculptor, Katie Dallam, who's lost half her brain in a boxing match (she was the inspiration for the Oscar-winning film "Million Dollar Baby") as she searches for the pieces of her past. The film explores meaning of images, fragility of memories and desire for relevance in today's world.
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LIGHTHOUSE: For The Blind and Visually Impaired
Although the notion of a blind photographer may strike some as counterintuitive, for Alice Wingwall, it couldn’t be a more natural form of expression. “Almost everyone asks the same question: “How can you possibly, how can you [take photographs]?” she observes. “I realize they are making a statement, not asking a question… My response is that any photograph begins as an idea in the brain.”
In November 1917, LIGHTHOUSE hosted a special exhibition of work by acclaimed blind photographer Alice Wingwall at its San Francisco headquarters.
“The video was made by the LightHouse for the Blind in san Francisco in 2017 and was produced by Camilla Sterne”
