{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/obscured-portraits-seen-and-unseen-national-center-of-photography-and-images-taipei-review-troels-steenholdt-heiredal/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":128481,"slug":"obscured-portraits-seen-and-unseen-national-center-of-photography-and-images-taipei-review-troels-steenholdt-heiredal","title":"How Disability Reshapes Photography","excerpt":"Surveying the historic representation of the blind and visually impaired in photography – and even simulating their experience – a new show in Taipei expands what ‘seeing’ can mean","content":"\n

A new show in Taipei expands what ‘seeing’ can mean, surveying the historic representation of the blind and visually impaired – and even simulating their experience

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In Chinese, the character 看 (kàn), ‘to see’, is composed of the eye 目 (mù) and the hand 手 (shǒu): historically, a hand shielding the eyes to look into the distance. But I suggest another reading: the touch of the eye – seeing as a tactile engagement with the world. This is evident in blind photographer Gerardo Nigenda’s work, where the photograph becomes something touched rather than merely seen. Across their surface, braille writing is embossed, the text describing the work, sometimes in poetic abstraction, sometimes in direct description, typically repeated, whole or partially, as the title of the work. In Between the Invisible and the Tangible… Arriving at Emotional Homeostasis (2007), fingers, presumably Nigenda’s, touch a woman’s chin as she wears a blindfold and smiles. In There is a link, there is a fusion, there is an interaction! (2007), her naked lower body is seen from the side as she holds Nigenda’s hand; in Multi-Looks in Corporal Ascension (2007), only her legs are visible as his outstretched hand touches them. The braille invites us to assume a position similar to Nigenda’s; a doubling of hands as we almost reenact his movement, only we are touching the photograph.

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Nigenda’s work, along with that of three other blind or visually impaired artists, is included in the first of two parts in this group exhibition, a section subtitled ‘Boundaries of the Gaze’, among 49 works by 24 artists or duos from around the world. It opens, however, with a simulation of blindness for sighted visitors. In a darkened room, visitors move along the wall, guided by a railing, with small nubs indicating that they have reached one of nine seemingly random photographs reproduced as raised-line drawings. The simulation risks reducing blindness to the absence of sight, precisely when the rest of the exhibition suggests more complex ways of contemplating perception. More compelling are the wider exhibition’s access devices. Each section showing photographs has one work reproduced as a raised-line drawing on a slanted plane, which also includes a written image-description overlaid with braille and a push-button to have the description read aloud. Here, all audiences are offered different means of access to the work: seeing, touching, reading and listening. Expanding what ‘seeing’ can mean.

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Paul Strand, New York (Blind Woman), 1916, photogravure. Courtesy Open Content Program, Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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‘Boundaries of the Gaze’ also includes a survey of the historic representation of the blind and visually impaired in photography.
Paul Strand’s New York (Blind Woman) (1916) is a prominent example. The photo’s most notable element is the white sign with ‘BLIND’ in bold black letters hanging around the woman’s neck. Her left eye is open, refusing to look at us – or is she unaware that she is being captured? Centring her blindness turns disability into the defining fact of the image, which becomes a voyeuristic capture of the exotic other, laced with pity.

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Part two, ‘Perceptions Beyond Sight’, comprises 25 works by 16 Taiwanese artists, and includes a late-modern survey of blindness and disability, in which disabled people are still largely positioned as subjects rather than authors of their own representation. As Joseph Grigely wrote in Postcards to Sophie Calle (1991), ‘cultural representations of the disabled are often, it seems, mediated by those who are from outside the experience’. Chou Ching-Hui’s A Nurse Assists a Patient with Limited Mobility in the Blind Patient Ward (1992) shows a patient on their elbows and knees, facing away from the camera, with their pants pulled down. A large white patch has been taped to their right buttock. The nurse in the foreground is preparing another patch, likely for a sore visible on the left buttock. While one could read the photo as showing care for the disabled, it could also question the conditions under which care is provided: the exposure of a body in an intensely vulnerable position.

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Chao-Tang Chang, Zhubei, Social Memory series, 1984, gelatine silver print. Courtesy National Center of Photography and Images, Taipei
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The survey is presented in a documentary style, which achieved particular aesthetic authority in Taiwan during the 1980s, not least through the pioneering social-commentary magazine Ren Jian (人間). Towards the end of martial law, the genre offered a powerful means of exposing injustices long obscured under authoritarian rule. This history continues to shape the direction of Taiwanese photography. Yet that legacy can also narrow photography’s perceived field of possibility, making conceptual, abstract or non linear approaches more contested within the contemporary Taiwanese art scene.

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An alternative to this documentary mode appears in Niu Jun-Qiang’s videowork NIU Jun-Qiang Solo Exhibition 2018 (2018), not included here. In that work we see him guide visually impaired artist and art critic Hsu Jia-Feng around an empty exhibition space, describing the works he intends to install. When shown in 2018 at Taipei’s TKG+, the video was at the entrance; visitors would see it before entering the gallery to find the space empty, raising a question about where the work exists. Rather than treating visual description merely as an accommodation, Niu turned it into the work’s generative medium, asking what other worlds were possible.

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When experience is overlooked, disability remains something to be represented rather than a position from which to create. Obscured Portraits underscores a critical shift: institutions can move beyond explaining disability towards giving disabled artists equal space to experiment, contradict and complicate how we understand perception. The question is not simply how to make photography accessible to disabled audiences, but what photography becomes when disabled ways of perceiving actively shape the work.

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Obscured Portraits: Seen and Unseen at National Center of Photography and Images, Taipei, 22 May – 26 October

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From the Autumn 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.

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Read next ‘Widening the Lens’: A Corrective for Landscape Photography

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