A look past what can be seen

The photographs seem an unexplained mix of childlike out-of-focus blur and the oddly angled deliberately artsy.

A seated woman is shown only from the top of her smiling upper lip. A church congregation's members, shot from behind, raise their arms in praise before a mural of a kneeling Jesus. A photographer takes a picture of her reflection in a mirror. A man stands in an office, shown from the shoulders of his striped shirt to just above his knees.

The captions identifying the photographers explain. Billy, 16, light perception. Pam, 16, low vision. Reba, 13, low vision. Merlett, 13, no vision.

Captured in a new book, "Seeing Beyond Sight: Photographs by Blind Teenagers," the pictures were all taken by students at Raleigh's Governor Morehead School for the blind as part of an experiment to put cameras in the hands of people with visual impairments. What started tentatively with three students expanded into a years-long program that touched many.

And if the premise seems odd, the results are clear. In the absence of physical vision, artistic vision may flourish. The collected results are photographs taken through the ears, hands and hearts rather than through the eye.

"[The book] will dispel ongoing stereotypes of what the limitations on blind people are," says Dennis Thurman, the director of Governor Morehead School. "It does show that people with visual impairment are able to participate and benefit from an activity that many would think would be closed to them."

Thurman was not yet at the school when Tony Deifell called with the idea of teaching photography to blind students. Deifell, who had graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a degree in anthropology, had excelled as a student photojournalist and had considered a career in photography. Deifell wondered what he would do as a photographer if he ever lost his eyesight, and then he heard a radio interview with a jazz musician who was blind but still took pictures. That, combined with work he was already doing with a Durham schoolteacher, led him to call Governor Morehead School.

At first, the person taking the call thought it was a prank. But Deifell was persistent. He eventually received permission for an after-school program that started out with three students, one of whom soon stopped participating. Deifell worried that the students might feel worse about their disability because of the new endeavor.

"We weren't sure this experiment would work," he says. But the other two stuck with it and, over the course of five years, the program expanded. Deifell worked with other instructors at the school, like Shirley Hand and Dan Partridge, for the class they called "Sound Shadows" with photography serving as a way to support the school's reading and writing curriculum.

The students were given basic photography instruction -- things like holding the camera steady or taking pictures with the sun behind them, and then given assignments such as self-portraits or photographs of their community. At the time, from 1992 to 1997, pictures were still being shot on film, so the pictures had to be developed and then the instructors would describe the pictures to their student photographers to compare the intended photograph to the actual one.

"The students took much more compelling images when they disregarded our instructions," Deifell says.

"When you lead with your eyes in the world -- not just for them, for us -- how often do we jump to conclusions about people? To stereotypes?"

In his introduction to the book, Deifell writes about the pictures of the sidewalk taken by a student who he assumed had made a mistake. But Deifell was the one who was mistaken. It seems the young woman sent the pictures to a leader at the school and explained how her cane became stuck in the cracks she had photographed. She asked that the cracks be fixed, and they were.