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Photography wasn’t the most obvious subject to teach. I wondered, “What would children who are blind show us about the world, if they learned to take pictures?” The cameras were point-and-shoot, so their challenge lay mostly in where to point them. Our words were their eyes and the whole process of helping our students “see” made me very conscious of our power as teachers. I wondered if photography would only serve to make students feel bad about their disability. At first, I offered students guidelines in an attempt to make their pictures “look good”: Hold the camera level. Don’t cut off anyone’s head. Make sure the sun is behind you. If you’re too close, the picture will blur. The students would ask questions about their surroundings, feel their subjects with their hands, and listen carefully to the hush and noise around them. It was as if they were listening for “sound shadows,” a term that became the name of our project, inspired by a memoir about growing up blind by Ved Mehta, longtime writer for the New Yorker. Students found their own reasons for taking pictures in a world that doesn’t expect them to communicate visually. Looking at the students’ photographs and reading their captions was like listening to someone who has recently learned a new language. The more I returned to the photographs, the more I could see in them; there were always more layers to uncover. The images drew me in with clues about what was hidden just outside the frame, in the shadows, a moment before or after the shutter snapped, or in the unknown intentions of the photographer.

I started teaching photography with the assumption that everything about eyesight was good and sufficient. But some of the world can’t be seen because we can’t illuminate it. A rabbi once told me that the Talmud refers to people who are blind as sagi nahor, Aramaic words that mean “great eyesight.” As the rabbi explained, perhaps people who are blind see more than those who are sighted; perhaps there is seeing beyond sight…