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Through Different Lenses – a photography project about visual percetion disorders
Graduation project at Beckman’s College of Design. Stefan Skoghs Scholarship 2007/Nominated in Kolla 2008
Photographers: Hellen van Meene, Brendan Austin, Ida Borg, Andreas Ackerup, Anna Gaskell, Emilia Bergmark Jiménez, Thobias Fäldt, Masao Yamamoto, Marcus Palmqvist, Martina Hoogland Ivanow,
Alexandra Catiere, Christian Erroi. Illustrated disorders: prosopagnosia (face blindness), scotoma (blind spots), topographagnosia, glaucoma, micropsia,synesthesia, hemianopsia (peripheral vision), apperceptive agnosia, akinetopsia (motion agnosia), visual hemi-neglect, central achromatopsia (color blindness).
Photography is often considered a reflection of reality. For this reason, I asked a number of photographers to create images illustrating different perceptions of reality. Each photographer was asked to create 1 – 5 new images from a specific visual perception disorder. Perception disorders affect the way we see and perceive the world. Complete color blindness, for instance. A person with this disorder will see only different shades of lightness, or different shades of grey. Another less common disorder is Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness. A person with prosopagnosia will in some cases not recognize the faces of their children, relatives or even their own face. These are just a few examples of disorders and, in this specific context, examples of how perception disorders can change our understanding of reality. Besides illustrating these disorders, the photographers represent a specific way of seeing, this being communicated through the visual language of their images. I consciously invited photographers with a broad range of visual languages and backgrounds into the project. The project therefore includes documentary photographers, fine art photographers, architectural photographers and fashion photographers. By creating images of various kinds of reality, the underline message, or rather statement, is that our vision is individual. That is to say; reality is always subjective. The main focus of this project is visual perception. However, the further I examined the various realities of perception, the more obvious it became, that I also wanted to ask the question: what is real? In this sense, the project may be considered to have philosophical ambitions as well. The general understanding seems to be, that there is in fact a “normal” or “correct” way of perceiving the world. In this project those presumptions are put to the test, using photography as a way to interpret (or if you will, document) the different realities in our world.
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