Blind/Sight: Conversations with the Visually Inspired
Blind/Sight is a multi-media project featuring a diverse group of people all living with a visual impairment. I photographed and interviewed each participant and worked with designer/illustrator Laurie Shock who created visual illustrations of what you might see looking through their eyes. These are profiles I wrote of two of the participants.
Annie Maxwell
Blind from Birth with No Known Cause
Annie Maxwell did not know she was blind until she was seven years old. “Nobody told me. I kind of thought everyone lived in the same fogginess that I did.”

When her brother, a year younger than she, started school, she said, “Hey, wait a minute. Something is not right.” That was the last time Annie has ever been left behind.
When kids at her children’s school made fun of their mom’s eyes, Annie asked to do training sessions with the students to teach them about blindness. She was a hit. The children understood. It was the adults that became the obstacle.
“I realized this, that when you’re visually impaired or blind, you have to be the leader, because if you’re not in the leadership role, they won’t listen.” So Annie got involved with the school fundraisers, tallying more money than anyone else, and was elected president of the PTA. Now they listened.
Parlaying her intelligence and charisma into a life filled with family and achievements, Annie went on to receive a masters degree in recreational therapy. She teaches children and young adults how to manage their lives in a seeing world through the STARS program at CVI (Center for the Visually Impaired).
She recently received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Community Health Leadership Award for her work, a prestigious honor never before bestowed on someone with a visual impairment.
“I’ve always felt that I had to kind of live above other people and what they were doing in order to make myself known and to make myself noticed as an individual. I don’t know if that is something that is good or bad, but it is one of the things that is real.”
Henry Hall
Retinopathy of Prematurity
Henry Hall will charm your socks off. At the beginning of the interview, he began: “If I can wait just a minute, that’d be great . . . to get my brain started.” His brain is a wondrous thing. Born with multiple visual disorders, Henry’s vision is like a crazy quilt, each part of his eye seeing a little different and some parts not at all. As he views the world his mind connects all of these puzzle pieces into whole cloth.

Henry has been learning Braille, in his words, since he was a little boy. Now, at five, he talks about his favorite letters, speaking in the dot patterns that form his alphabet. “I’ve been learning Braille since I was just about three years old. And I like to read braille and I think I’m going to teach you some letters I’ve learned. Now you’ll never forget this one: ‘B’ is just dots, one, two and ‘A’ is just dot one.”
Getting around he uses his cane, appropriately named “Mr. Cane.” He has two dogs, one who “bites a little bit. She is my best dog I’ve ever had! I’ve been teaching my dog some tricks about every day.”
His family circles Henry with love. He was born early, at 24 weeks, with both retinas detached, part of his optic nerves have died and parts of the nerve are small. He has borderline glaucoma and very small optic chasms.
His mother, Martha, said it was devastating to find out Henry was visually impaired. “You grieve for your normal child that’s not ever going to be normal, and what they’ll miss growing up. But we made the decision a long time ago that Henry is a little boy first, who just happens to be visually impaired. And that’s how we’ve raised him. And he is active and happy and involved and participates in everything that he wants to participate in, with very few limitations.”

