Shades of Blindness

I think it is fair to say that my cataract operations were successful. For the first time in three years I can read print, the world is so bright and colourful it feels like I am on the set of The Wizard of Oz, and all my friends and colleagues look about twenty years older. But whilst my sight is better than it was when I was an undergraduate student, I am still legally blind. I feel like I can see again but it turns out I still can't read the eye chart, see detail close up or at a distance or recognise people. Navigating in crowded or unfamiliar places is still tricky and stressful and I still need my reading glasses, my telescope and my white cane. And now I also need shades. I used to hate wearing sun glasses. By blocking out what little light made it into my eyes, they made me even blinder than ever. But now I can't go out without them. My new cataract-less eyes are amazingly sensitive to light. Even with my shades, I can see colours more brightly than I could before. But wearing shades has a drawback I hadn't expected. By hiding my eyes, the shades also hide my blindness. And because my eyes look different they work a little bit like my white cane - they tell people that because my eyes do not look the same as theirs, I might not see the same as them. So when I go out with my shades but without my white cane I look completely sighted. And this can cause problems. Last weekend I went to a music festival with my family. We had a lovely time camping, eating bacon sandwiches and drinking wine (not necessarily all at the same time). But when I went down to the front to watch a band (without my white cane), a rather irate lady accused me of pushing in. I honestly had not meant to push in front of her and was genuinely shocked at her anger. I was also upset because I realised that I do not in fact see as well as I thought. I still miss visual cues (and clues) and without my white cane this makes me look at best clumsy, and at worse rude. So even though my cane is heavy and cumbersome, and even though my new sight makes me wonder if I am really as blind as the medics' measurements suggest, I will still be using my cane and still proudly defining myself as 'partially blind'.

BBC Radio Four

Me and Jenni Murray just after my interview. 

Many thanks to fellow guest and children's book illustrator Sarah McIntyre for taking this photo.

Sarah has written a great account of our Woman's Hour adventure here. 

I have loved BBC Radio 4 all my adult life. We have at least six radios in our house and I increasingly listen via my phone wherever I am. Radio 4 wakes me up every morning and accompanies me on car, train, bus and plane journeys. It has stopped me feeling lonely in hotel rooms from Salford to Salt Lake City and keeps me amused when I am cooking. I even listened to Radio 4 whilst giving birth to my two sons.

Yesterday was quite simply one of the most exciting days of my life. I moved from passive listener to active participant as I was interviewed by the majestic Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour (from 30:30). I was talking about my take on the What I See project and the ways modern society is obsessed with how we look.

It seemed particularly fitting that I was arguing for a rethinking of the hierarchy of the senses via a largely sightless medium. Radio 4 is an essential part of mainstream British culture. And yet its enduring hold over the nation testifies to the fact that sight is not a necessary part of our lived experience. Yesterday I realised that radio journalists and producers build a subtle kind of audio description into everything they do. Places and people are announced as a matter of course. Every time Jenni Murray asked me a question she prefaced it with my name. Her primary reason for doing this was to remind listeners who I was and to differentiate my voice from that of my fellow interviewee Edwina Dunn. But Jenni's technique was crucial to me for another reason. Because I cannot always see enough to know when someone is addressing me, I rely on the kinds of audio prompts which are much more common on the radio than in real life.

The Woman's Hour team: 

Jenni Murray in the centre, and from the left Assistant Producer Jane Worsley, Producer Bernadette McConnell, fellow guest Sarah McIntyre and me. 

There is no doubt that modern society places too much emphasis on the visual. And this has the unpleasant consequence of marginalising the blind and the partially blind. But my experiences yesterday reminded me that anyone who engages with radio - as listener, presenter, producer or technician - already has an intuitive appreciation of the non-sighted world. Anyone who listens to the radio already knows what it is like to be blind: it is not a tragedy, it is just a different way of being.

What I See when I look in the Mirror

According to its press release, the What I See Project is 'a global online platform that recognises and amplifies women's voices'. I was delighted to be asked to be part of this fascinating project, but I was also worried by the project's apparent emphasis on the visual. As I say in my video reflection, modern society's obsession with how we look has the unintended consequence of privileging sight over all the other senses. This in turn has the nasty effect of turning blindness into a tragedy. 

I have found that society's obsession with the misery of blindness makes it very difficult for the blind and the partially blind to feel happy and confident about themselves. When pity is the prevailing emotion you encounter in strangers, it is easy to think of yourself as a victim. Self-pity is a destructive state of mind; it leads to low self-esteem and depression. But until society stops pitying the blind, how will the blind learn to stop pitying themselves?

I want to use my part in the What I See project to encourage women to think critically about our relationship with sight. Why do we care what we see in the mirror? Why is appearance to crucial to us? Do we really learn important details about a person from how they look to us? My face-blindness means I cannot recognise my family, friends and colleagues by their facial features. Instead I recognise them by their general shape, their unique style and their voice. This can have its disadvantages but it also has its uses. It constantly reminds me that we are much more than what we appear to be: we have experiences, history, memories which are not necessarily visible on our surface. As another contributor to the What I See project, Karen Morris at Beyond the Bathroom Scale reminds us, bodily appearance is overrated. Karen writes eloquently about the need to embrace the reality of how our bodies look here.

The communicator videos and ambassador profiles on the What I See webpage are reassuringly resistant to the purely visual. It turns out that I needn't have worried. Most women see much more than their surface appearance when they look in the mirror. But society at large is still obsessed with sight. Hopefully this will change in the wake of this exciting project.

Upload a video describing what you see when you look in the mirror and you might win an invitation to the What I See launch event at the Science Museum on October 1st.

Face Blindness

One of the reasons that I love audio description is that I have always been terrible at recognising people. I just do not see faces clearly enough to be able to tell who people are from what they look like.  I recognise most people I know by a combination of their voice, their general body shape, their hair style, the clothes that they wear and, crucially, the context in which I encounter them.

So if I am at work and someone says hello to me in the corridor, I know it is most likely a student or colleague. My brain usually comes up with the right identity based on the factors listed above. If this doesn't work I tend to enquire after the person's health in the hope that either their voice and general demeanour will tell me who (as well as how) they are, or they will mention in passing some crucial piece of information (a location, child's name, shared concern) which will allow me to work out who they are.

This somewhat haphazard approach usually works reasonably well. More often than not I manage to work out who I am talking to before it becomes apparent that I started off the conversation completely in the dark. Luckily, most people are relatively predictable in their style of dress and general body shape. Most people are also more than happy to talk about themselves, thus giving me crucial clues as to their identity. But recently, I found myself in two situations where my tried and tested people-recognition techniques faltered.

Over the weekend I attended a party at my parents' house. Although I have known many of the guests for over thirty years, I spent much of the evening struggling to work out who I was talking to. It seems that people who have no problem with facial recognition cannot imagine what it is like not to recognise people in this way. Even though my eyes look noticeably different from other people's and all my parents' friends know that I am registered blind, no-one told me who they were before embarking in conversation. I think I made a reasonably good job of putting names to faces, especially because I knew exactly who was at the party, but it was quite an effort and did lead to some awkward moments. If I had been wearing dark glasses and /or holding my white cane, I'm sure people would have been more forthcoming. But I guess it feels odd to introduce yourself to someone who you have known for thirty years.

It is hardest for me to recognise people when they appear in an unexpected place or at an unexpected time. I would not recognise my husband if I encountered him unannounced at my place of work. I would not be able to pick out my children if I happened across them during a school trip and I would not recognise my best friend if I met her in the supermarket. This does not mean I do not love these people, it just means that I need more clues before I can identify them. This morning I was approached at the railway station by a friendly stranger who turned out to be a close and dear friend. When he first said hello to me I had no idea who he was. I quickly ran through a mental list of which people I might conceivably encounter at Oxford station early on a Monday morning and no one on this (admittedly short) list fitted. Plus, I wasn't even sure he was talking to me. He persisted in his greeting until I smiled and said hello back. Still having no idea who he was, I asked him which train he was getting in the hope that this would prompt him to reveal some crucial information without giving away the fact that I still didn't know who I was talking to. Luckily as soon as he said more than a few words I recognised his voice instantly and was (belatedly) delighted to see him.

As I ran for my train I wondered why I put myself in such an awkward situation. When my friend said hello to me, why did I pretend I knew who he was? Why not simply ask him to tell me his name? Social convention is a pretty powerful thing. Everything we learn about human interaction is based on the assumption that human faces are instantly recognisable. Infringing this rule feels deeply wrong. Perhaps I'm worried that people will be embarrassed by their assumptions, offended by my forgetfulness or hurt by their own apparent forgetableness. More alarmingly, I wonder if my reluctance to ask people to identify themselves comes from deep-seated feelings about my blindness. Despite my best efforts, am I still harbouring feelings of shame or self-hatred? Is my denial of my own inability to recognise people part of a need to 'pass' as a perfectly sighted person and thus refuse the validity of my way of seeing? Whilst sipping my latte I decided that I would use the memory of this encounter to be more honest with people about what I can and cannot see.

Looking at the Blind

This striking image of a blind beggar was taken in New York by Paul Strand and published in 1917. It raises fascinating questions about the politics of looking at the blind. This women's use of a large written label immediately puts her on display. She is positioning herself as an image to be interpreted, a text to be read. She is an object to be looked at. She is also positing herself as a victim of misfortune. The assumption here is that her label will encourage people to pity her and thus to help her. This woman's use of a textual clue demonstrates that despite (or perhaps because) of her blindness, she has a profound understanding of how the sighted world works. People are always looking, always interpreting and always responding to what they see. This  beggar's use of visual clues knowingly exploits the way the sighted relate to the world.

The fact that this woman has been immortalised in a photograph raises another set of issues. Photography is of course a profoundly visual medium. And by making a blind woman the subject of a photograph, the artist suggests that blindness is not necessarily the opposite of vision, it is (or it gives rise to) another kind of vision. Or, to put it another way, blindness has led to vision because it has led to a photographic image.

I'd like to know how this woman would feel about being looked at and photographed in this way. Her use of the sign and her situation on the street already position her as an object of the public gaze. But she is doing this for a reason. Does she know that she is being photographed? Does she even know what photography is or implies? Another way of reading this photograph is to say that it emphasises - indeed extends - the gulf between this woman and the sighted people who look at this photo. The viewer's difference from her is encapsulated in their very act of viewing. As soon as someone sees this photograph, they are reminded that they possess the very thing whose lack has led to the creation of this image. It seems very fitting that it is this woman's blindness which reinforces the sighted viewer's sense of his or her own superiority over the subject of this photograph. The viewer can see her blindness precisely because he or she does not experience it. In another way, of course, vision lets us down in this picture. We cannot tell by looking at this woman that she is blind. It is only by reading the textual clue that we know this. But what if this clue were a lie? What if this woman were not blind? When we look at this picture we trust what we see and we assume that the written sign refers to the woman it is attached to. How would our reading of this photograph change if we knew that this woman was looking back at the photographer?

My thanks to James Kent for introducing me to this picture during his talk on the flaneur in Cuba as part of RHUL's seminar series.

Click here for more on Paul Strand's photo