'A View Through My Eyes'

At the beginning of A2 Photography, we were set a 'photography challenge', which was numerous bullet points we had to respond to. One of these was 'a view through something.' I decided to give a view through my eyes (I am short sighted). The photo below shows roughly how I saw the view without my glasses - I couldn't get it quite right and this in fact shows it better than I can actually see. 

This photo shows the same view, but how I saw it with my glasses. I purposely included the glasses in the shot, round the edge of the frame to show visibly what I was trying to represent in the photo above.

I have chosen to develop this idea into my personal investigation for A2 Photography because people with perfect vision will never know what it is like to see with a vision impairment. How I see is a difficult thing to explain verbally, so the visual medium of photography is perfect.

A National Geographic photographer called Joe McNally completed an assignment for the magazine in 1992 titled 'The Sense of Sight'. He only really explored blindness and complete sight loss, whereas I want to explore partial vision impairment  but his photographs were a good starting point.

These next two photos are initial shots for my personal investigation. The pier at Brighton is an iconic sight and here's how I saw it without my glasses on:

These two photos illustrate well what it is like to be short sighted because in the one above you can see all how the individual pieces of metal , so clearly visible in the one below, blur together into an indistinct shape, with all the detail removed. In the one above you can still see the pier, but not very clearly.

I printed the photo above huge - four A3 sheets tall by four A3 sheets wide and people with perfect vision who have seen it have said it does create a feeling of confusion and that it make their eyes feel weird. However this isn't as big as I would like it to be, because when you stand in front of it, you can see things out of you peripheral vision that isn't the picture. One final piece idea that I have had is to print this photo (or another one I'm yet to take that shows a feeling of confusion more effectively), or project it, so big that when a person is standing in front of it, it is all they would be able see. I would present this at one end of a darkened room, with the only light source in the room being the lighting focused on this massive photograph. This would make sure the viewer is only focused on the photograph and hopefully being in the room will create a feeling of confusion.

The photo of the sunset has an abstract, painterly  feel to it, but it also has a feeling of confusion created by the 'unfocus'. This is one of the aspects I want to explore: the feeling of vulnerability and confusion created when I take my glasses off. Of course this doesn't just happen to me, but anyone with short sightedness, or other vision impairments. One idea I have to make this project less personal and more about vision impairment in general is to take photos of people, in the style of August Sander, with their glasses on, their glasses off and then a photograph of how they see. 

Following this theme of making it more general, I used a pair of my dad's old glasses because he is much more short sighted than me and has prism lenses. I thought these glasses with a much stronger prescription would emphasis the short sighted effect much more than mine, and they did. 
This first photo I took was mainly to document the strength of the glasses, which is why the glasses are parallel to the frame of the photo.

In the photo below, I wanted to focus on the feeling of confusion created by the strength of the prescription, so I tilted the camera off horizontal and made the glasses not parallel to the frame. This makes the viewer tilt their head when looking at the photo, which creates a feeling of confusion.