(gentle music)
Welcome to Hadley Presents.
I'm your host, Ricky Enger,
inviting you to sit back, relax,
and enjoy a conversation with the experts.
In this episode, guest Michael Nye joins us
to discuss his photography and audio exhibition,
My Heart is Not Blind.
Welcome to the show, Michael.
Thank you, Ricky.
Thank you for inviting me on your podcast.
So great to have you.
So great to learn about what you do,
which is really, really fascinating.
And I have, you know,
I have to admit that I didn't know until recently.
And so, once I found out,
I'm really excited to share that with our audience as well,
'cause you've done some amazing things.
So, before we talk about one specific project
that you've done, why don't you just give a brief intro?
Tell us a bit about yourself, who you are, what you do?
For the last 40 years,
I've been really interested in philosophy.
I've been interested in photography.
I've been interested in the nature of storytelling
and how powerful that can be.
How stories are the threads that bind us together.
I think all of my projects
have been about wanting to know more.
A desire to understand communities,
people, places, ideas unlike my own.
And with photography, you know, I went into wars by myself.
I went into Siberia over the Bering Strait
in the middle of a winter
and live with Chichi natives and Russian soldiers,
refugee camps in the Middle East, Palestinian refugee camps.
I put my finger on a map in China
and went there for a month back in the early '90s.
So, a lots of projects,
and I use this old box cameras called Deardorff.
It's an 8 by 10 view camera.
And it's the kind that Mathew Brady used
during the Civil War.
It's like it has an accordion to it.
There's no batteries, nothing moves,
and you use film plates.
And so, if I go out photographing, for an example,
I may have 12 sheets of film, and that's it for that day.
So, you have to be careful,
and you have to think about what you're doing.
I think every person,
every place is a map to somewhere else.
We're all connected.
I think that philosophy
really does show through in your work,
and you've tackled a really wide variety of subjects,
and many of which people would shy away
from really approaching.
So, you've done things on hunger.
You've done things on mental illness, teen pregnancy,
just to name a few.
You have done the project
that we're here to talk about today,
which is My Heart is Not Blind.
And just having people who are blind
or low vision sort of share their stories.
And you've made an exhibition out of that.
What was the reason
for your choosing this project in particular?
What inspired you to do that?
This project is two things.
It's a book that's published by Trinity University Press,
and it came out when the show first opened,
and it's also a traveling exhibition.
It opened at the Witte Museum in San Antonio.
It's a huge museum, and over 20,000 people went in.
And so, you can imagine
there's 50 large black and white portraits,
silver-printed in a dark room.
And next to each portrait is an audio box with headphones.
And so, anyone in the community going into the museum
would put on the headphones,
and that person is speaking in their own voice
about their life,
not just about blindness or visual impairment,
but about, you know,
all the things that we all have in common.
I think the project, now looking back,
is totally about understanding.
It's about the nature and ambiguity of blindness,
about the nature of perception,
which is such a mystery.
A major part of the exhibit is about human adaptation
for anyone, blind or sighted.
About the brain's ability to rewire itself
to favor non-visual thinking.
It's about our shared humanity, our shared fragility,
what we have in common.
I love working slowly on a project
and working with that person.
And each person had ability
to make sure they approved everything that I did,
both the text and the audio.
Gosh, I met so many friends,
and what a privilege it was to be a listener,
to listen and learn from someone else.
Yeah, and I think it's so incredibly important
that you allowed them to not only tell their stories
but to make sure that those stories really were represented
in a way that was comfortable for them.
And that sort of met what you had set out to do as well.
And so, it was such a collaborative project.
Did you go into this with sort of something in mind
and you had a vision as to how this would all play out
in the story that you wanted to tell,
and maybe you had some preconceptions
before you got started?
Did any of those things,
were things a lot different than you expected
or were some things reinforced
what you actually already felt,
or maybe a combination of both?
Yes, to everything you said.
Backing up just a moment, almost 30 years ago,
I was invited on Arts America Tour in Southeast Asia
to exhibit photographs
and to give the talk about photography and aesthetics.
And this curator in Riyadh,
the capital of Saudi Arabia, said,
"Would you give a gallery talk
to some international blind students?"
I didn't think anything about it,
but what I remember,
and I will never forget was their attention,
their gaze, their intense listening, their curiosity,
a whisper seemed like it would travel far.
And I remember talking about how light is different
in the morning versus the evenings, how it changes.
I talked about that a black and white photograph
can be aesthetically beautiful,
the way it's black and grays and whites are arranged.
And then they started asking me questions,
and they were really fundamental questions,
profound, simple, philosophical questions.
"Why are you a photographer? What's black and white?
What's a beautiful if it's nonvisual?
What's the meaning of these photographs?
The photographs represent reality.
How does anyone blind, or sighted,
or visually impaired
understand the world outside themselves?"
And I think at that very moment, we switched places.
They were giving the gallery talk,
and I was a student listening and learning from them.
This reminded me of Immanuel Kant,
the philosopher, 18th century,
that asked four fundamental questions.
"What they were doing? What did we do in our lives?
What can we know? What's the limits and extent of knowledge?
What do we all have in common?
And what can we expect from the future?"
And that's exactly what they were asking.
When I came back to San Antonio, this was some 30 years ago.
I came back to San Antonio.
I brought six people that were visually impaired or blind
and then six artists together,
no one teaching anyone anything.
Just to talk about perception.
Perceptions, not vision.
Perception is everything,
you know, awareness, metaphor, intuition.
And we went around the room,
and everyone came away with a larger vocabulary.
Everyone just was so moved
by listening to other people's experience.
So I just said,
"Someday I would like to spend a lot of time
listening to people around this country
that have some vision loss or blindness."
I was interested in what I could learn from them.
So I wasn't trying to do anything
except have a fidelity to each persons experience.
To try to be true
in the sense of what I'm editing and putting forth.
And that's why I work closely with each individual.
So I didn't have any preconceptions
other than I just thought it would be incredible
to have these deep and meaningful conversations.
That is so awesome.
Because if you go into tell a story,
you're already shaping it, right?
You already have something in mind that you want to tell,
and you're using a narrative to sort of fit that.
And so I love that you went in to learn,
and in the process of doing that,
you just happened to allow people to tell their stories,
and it was shaped into what you have now
for this exhibition.
When you worked with people,
how did you decide who to approach,
and what was their general feeling
about being involved in this?
And since it is such a collaborative thing,
I would imagine that you changed yourself,
and they probably did as well,
just sort of in the journey of creating this.
Can you talk a little about that?
It had one criteria.
I wasn't looking for success stories, failure stories,
tragic stories, happy stories.
My only criteria was, would you spend three days with me?
But it surprised me
on how many different causes of vision loss that people.
I mean, I never recognized
that there was almost 50 people in the exhibit,
and I probably had 24 different varieties
of vision loss or blindness.
You know, my questions were about blindness
and visual impairments,
but it's also about being a human being.
You know, what's your family's history?
What are you thinking about?
What do you hope for?
And I think people that participated saw the seriousness
and really jumped in
and used their voice in a courageous, vulnerable way,
which is never, which is not that easy all the time.
But I think it's,
if you spend two days, three days, four days,
sometimes I spend a week with someone,
it changes, you know?
It changes the way the questions,
it changes the listening.
Question and answer is a dialectical process.
You don't know where it's going when you start.
It's gonna end up somewhere very far from where you started.
Absolutely.
And so when all of this was done,
and it certainly did not happen overnight,
but when you created this, you know, you have a book,
you have a traveling exhibition,
which I am certainly curious about how that works,
and we'll get to that a bit later.
In any case,
you have a lot of these people experiencing the work
that you've put together.
Some of them are cited,
and they've never thought about a blind person before,
beyond just the word blind and what that might mean.
Some of them are friends and family of blind
or low vision people,
and some of them are blind or low vision themselves.
And so I'm kind of fascinated to know,
in as much as you've been able to observe this,
how were people's reactions different
just depending on the perspective
that they were experiencing this from?
Well, several answers to that.
One is, you know, from a sighted point of view,
I've worked on a project on young parents, ages 12 to 100,
everyone, men and women.
And that exhibit's probably gone to over a hundred cities.
Then I did a project on mental illness,
four years on that project, and it's gone to over 60 cities.
Then went on hunger in America,
which is not about poverty but hunger.
Someone could have been hungry as a child,
but not as an adult, that's gone to over 50 cities.
This is the fourth big project.
And I think this project there's more discrimination,
more misunderstanding.
I never thought that was possible.
When I took the book to Trinity University Press,
great press, but they have a group of readers.
They give their opinion about the book,
and they're usually PhDs, highly educated.
And this is what they said, Ricky.
One person said, "I found these narratives from the blind
and visually impaired to be so articulate.
I questioned whether these stories are really the sentences
spoke by the blind participants."
And then another one was,
"Would each of these participants recognize these words
as something they actually said?"
And so your question about the misunderstanding is profound.
That someone visual, if they imagine themselves blind,
of course at that moment,
they're not going to be able to do
all the things they're doing,
but they're not looking at adaptation.
How the brain, that you can learn all these things,
you can live a perfectly normal life,
an extraordinary life, or whatever life you want.
If you learn the skills, if you adapt, it takes time.
It's hard.
You know, I interviewed Michael Hingson,
you know, he was on the 78th floor of Tower One
when the first plane struck,
and he knew exactly how many steps from the 78th floor
to the lobby.
Probably most people that are blind wouldn't know that,
but he did.
But he says the biggest problem,
and almost everyone I interviewed
in one way or the other said, "It's not blindness.
Maybe it is,
but it's also what sighted people think about blindness.
They just don't get you can adapt."
You know, a lot of people that are blind are very visual.
I mean, you don't lose your visual memory
if you were sighted as a child,
and they visualize everything they do.
So everyone is so different.
I mean, being blind as a child
is so different than being blind at 70,
or being blind in a second, car wreck, aneurysm
is different than having retinitis pigmentosa,
or cone-rod dystrophy, or whatever.
And having parents or family that supports you
is so different than if you don't have that, you know?
And visual impairment
is like you're between these two worlds
of not completely blind, but not completely sighted.
So, you know, it's a big issue on discrimination.
That's a big one, and that's a hard one.
And it's a fight that I'm in whenever I speak to groups
or have my exhibits, because I always give lectures.
You know, I hit that one as hard as I can
because it's a lot of ignorance.
When the exhibit was opening at the Witte Museum,
I was at another gallery opening,
and this woman said, "Michael, what are you working on?"
I said, "I'm working on a project
on blindness visual impairment about adaptation perception,
mostly about perception."
And the woman said, "I'd rather kill myself than go blind."
She said that without a hesitation
and without any kind of reflection about it.
And I think in all the interviews that I've done,
I asked maybe one question,
probably the only question I asked everyone,
what is blindness not?
But some of the answers I got,
"It's not akin to death.
It's not like being buried alive.
It's not blackness or darkness forever.
It's not fear. It doesn't break you.
It's not a life of misery.
It's not the end of the world or the end of one's life.
It doesn't define me.
A characteristic, but it doesn't define me.
It's not the last act.
It's not a door that's locked."
That list can go on for 25 pages.
But it is about what we have in common,
and about possibilities, and about the change in attention,
and it's about justice, it's about fairness.
You know, it's about a lot of those things, I think.
And I think that is really, really well portrayed
in what you've done.
It's because you did talk to so many people
who shared their experiences,
and you put those together in a way
that I hope will be educational for people
because it was very powerful for me, even as a blind person,
just kind of listening to my own community tell its story,
knowing that there would be people out there
who had a number of misconceptions about blindness.
And, you know, our hope certainly is
that experiencing this exhibition
in whatever way that they can,
can address some of those things
and really break through that narrow mindset.
Speaking of experiencing the exhibition,
how can people do that?
Because you've talked about a book,
you've talked about it has traveled to multiple cities,
and I would suspect that the pandemic
has changed a little bit in that respect.
I know that there are parts of it available on the website.
So just talk about how people can then go
and find what you've done
and check out this and other projects.
The audio exhibition,
the traveling exhibition stopped with COVID.
So it'll start up again,
but there's no place right now
where all the stories are available.
The book's available,
but I will hope to have all the audio stories available
at some point.
You know, it's so different listening to someone
talk about their own lives
versus reading about someone's life.
I mean, they both have a strength and a weakness to it.
You know, for an example, just come to mind.
I interviewed, do you know Olivia Chavez from El Paso?
I don't,
but I did hear just a brief bit of her story from your site.
So those are all excerpts on my website,
but one thing she said,
"My mother tells me shortly
after I came home from the hospital
and my eyes were bandaged, my mother never hid me.
She would take me to the store,
and people would ask, 'What's wrong with your daughter?
Why are her eyes bandages? What happened?'
She would explain that I had cancer and had to have surgery,
had to have my eyes removed.
They would say, 'You must have done something wrong.
God punished you.'
Or they would say, 'Well, she had cancer.
Why didn't you just let her die?
How's she going to live this way?'
My mother would have used some expletives not to be repeated
and tell them to leave her alone and go away."
And then what I loved what Olivia did,
she took a trip to the Grand Canyon,
and this is just maybe six lines from that.
"I remember so much about it in terms of the weather.
We had sun a bit, and we had some extreme cold.
It was such a peaceful feeling.
Standing at the rim, I could feel the vastness,
the enormity of the canyon.
Even with the breeze, it was quiet.
Something came over me, I felt a chill.
I was even shaky, but not scared.
It struck me as a spiritual feeling.
I don't know if it's the same feeling
that someone has who can see,
but that's how I felt.
I felt small."
What a beautiful thing to say and to think about.
Absolutely. I totally agree.
And her story is just one of many that are shared.
Certainly, you have excerpts on the website
and that's MichaelNye.org.
We'll have that in the show notes
and hopefully when things are available again,
and people can travel, the exhibition can too.
But in the meantime, what comes next for you?
And do you ever revisit those people
that you spent some time with telling their stories?
Is there more to say in that exhibition or what comes next?
I didn't want to stop after seven years.
I really loved the process.
I have so many friends from those seven years,
and I'm in contact with many, many.
I think maybe 30 came to the opening around the country.
One flew in from Hawaii and all over the country,
they came into the opening, which was beautiful.
I'm working now on an essay project.
I did 27 series of photographs between '88 and 2000,
short series of photographs.
And I wrote an essay on each one and so I finished that.
And so I'm rewriting right now.
So hopefully that'll be a book,
and I'm trying to be an advocate for fairness.
We very much appreciate that.
And there's a lot of work to do, certainly,
but as we approach it with passion and again,
just recognizing everyone's humanity
and helping other people to recognize that as well
can really go quite a long way to making things better.
Michael, I want to thank you so, so much
for joining us today.
Is there anything else
that you would like to leave the listeners with
before we wrap up?
I just really appreciate your questions
and your podcast.
I'm going to go online this week and listen to others,
and thank you so much for including me.
I really appreciate that.
Absolutely. Thanks for spending time with us.
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