Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies

Vol. 14, No. 3 (2018)

Navigating Darkness: A Photographic Response to

Visual Impairment
Vendela Grundell

In recent years, photographs by persons with visual impairments are increasingly

shifting into new arenas: from sociological contexts of therapeutic pedagogies to
aesthetic contexts of art on public display. In this shift, discursive tropes about
vision, disability and artistic practice emerge. Moreover, these tropes emerge
around images—but a much-needed attention to the images is habitually by-
passed in curatorial as well as artistic statements in favor of an emphasis on the
troubling details of the artist’s life. As a consequence, the emancipatory agency of
the images is undermined when it is unmoored from its visual source.
This article adds nuance to a biographical approach by tending to the image
with a rare combination of art history, critical media theory and disability studies
on functional normality and variation. The focal point is a photograph by Kurt
Weston, who relates his work to experiences of otherness that follow an identi-
fication with homosexuality, AIDS and blindness—an otherness whose inclusive
quality plays out in the image yet remains unaccounted for by the surrounding
discourse without in-depth image analysis. Here, otherness is addressed in dialogue
with the notions of tactics and catharsis to unfold the performative operation
taking place within and around the image. Visual and verbal statements reveal
narratives that overlap yet also diverge, holding implications beyond the singular
image for a society where ableist notions of normality are taken for granted.

Vendela Grundell is an art historian, photographer, teacher, writer, and postdoctoral re-
searcher with a project on photography and visual impairment at Stockholm University
and Goldsmiths University of London. Her publications include Flow and Friction: On the
Tactical Potential of Interfacing with Glitch Art (Art & Theory Publishing, 2016) and a chapter
in Art and Photography in Media Environments (Lusófona University, 2016).

ISSN: 1557-2935 <http://liminalities.net/14-3/darkness.pdf>

Vendela Grundell Navigating Darkness

Kurt Weston: Peering through the Darkness (2009). Used by permission of the artist.

Introduction: Defiance and Discourse

You need to look at this disabled body, this aging body. And maybe you need
to reconsider your ideas about what is normal or abnormal. You need to look,
and I’m going to make you look.
These are the words and the image of Kurt Weston, standing at the center of this
article. Weston is an American photographer, born in 1957, who led a successful
career in the fashion industry until the mid-1990s when he began to lose his sight
as an effect of AIDS. In the five years from diagnosis to near-blindness, he
changed his personal and professional life, earned a fine arts degree and developed
an artistic corpus with a new perspective on making and experiencing images.
This article is about Weston’s photograph Peering through the Darkness from
the self-portrait series Blind Vision (2009) and about the discourse around it ex-
emplified by Sight Unseen: International Photography by Blind Artists where the image
and the quote appear (2009 a: 100). As the first big museum exhibition with
visually impaired photographers—touring over a dozen venues worldwide since

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2009—it is a key instance of an increasingly notable initiative to redirect impaired

photographers away from contexts of therapy towards contexts of art.
Weston addresses life with homosexuality, AIDS and blindness—a defiant
step enforced by choosing photography: a medium obsessed with visuality. To
analyze Weston’s image in the context of Sight Unseen reveals a discursive forma-
tion of photography and disability that is productive yet problematic. Exhibitions
mirror and generate discourse by what they show and say—and what they do not
(Foucault 1972: 38, 74, 116). The discourse around Weston shares his critique of
ableism, i.e. discrimination against disability, but stresses the artist’s life to a point
when the image is lost along with its agency to participate in the discourse (EB;
OED).1
The article complements a biographical approach with a close image analysis,
from a viewer perspective informed by semiotics and phenomenology (Merleau-
Ponty 1948; Barthes 1980; Alloa 2011). The material consists of visual and verbal
statements from Sight Unseen as well as from Kurt Weston’s website and the 2012
biography Journeys through Darkness by Alina Oswald. This delimitation gives in-
depth focus while being representative since the Blind Vision series, developed
from 2000, became a new starting-point when Weston lost his sight (Oswald 2012:
115-135). Rather than reducing the image to an illustration of loss, the analysis
shows how loss—as a biographical experience but also a socially constituted
one—manifests and makes meaning through what can be seen in the image.
To link the emancipatory drive of the discourse to its aesthetic source, the
analysis is contextualized in three themes—catharsis, tactics, and otherness—
supported by theories of disability and photography. Disability theory situates the
unruly body as a site from where to critique normality (Siebers 2006: 30, 64-65,
68; McRuer 2006: 6-7, 19, 31-34; 2018: 22). As the image of Weston’s unruly body
evokes haptic and kinetic qualities, it engages with a multisensory and socio-
cultural visuality (Marks 2002; Mirzoeff 2006; Paterson 2006). On this basis, the
image becomes a visual variation of the verbal and bodily acts by which social
relations are established and transformed—unique yet referential, descriptive yet
open to reinterpretation (Austin 1962; Butler 1988; Iversen 2007). This perform-
ative take on photography shifts the notion of the image as a what-has-been to-
wards a what-will-be (Iversen 2007: 91-94, 104-105; Schneider 2011: 138-144).
Weston’s quote signals an activist stance against normality that points to a
kinship between disruptive practices: the cripping of ableist tropes evolved from
a queering of gender scripts and is here linked to the glitching of technical proto-
cols. Introduced in due course, along with details about Weston, suffice it now to
state that this case study is motivated by his way of disrupting normativity by

1
See Shooting Blind: Photographs by the Visually Impaired (2002), Seeing Beyond Sight:
Photographs by Blind Teenagers (2007), See as No Other: Photographs by the Visually Impaired
(2015) and The Blind Photographer (2016) for examples like Sight Unseen.

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making us see the unruly body as well as the norms behind our seeing. The act of
making visible leads beyond individual circumstances to a mediation that acts on
behalf of its creator, its contexts and its unstable selves: it invites us to take a look.

A Look: Seeing with Peering through the Darkness

The three selected contexts where this image appears—exhibition, website and
book—yield scarce information besides biographical details. Neither website nor
exhibition give much comment on the production process. In the biography, the
author briefly notes the artist’s preference for black-and-white negative film and
silver gelatin prints, as well as his purchase of a handheld telescope and magnifi-
cation glasses (Oswald 2012: 128, 132). Regarding this particular image, she
states that Weston “sprayed a glass with foaming glass cleaner and took a self-
portrait sitting behind it” (2012: 133). This explanation is missing in the other
contexts yet the presence of a liquid corresponds to the image. However, the
image is made using a scanner, noted in the exhibition and confirmed by the artist.
Scanning gives a short and shallow depth of field that renders the body in
the image pressed to the glass horizontally with liquid dropping out rather than
down. Closest to the hard light, the details of the outer side of the right hand and
the tip of the nose burn away against the dark. Reflecting no external light, the
body is represented through the source and process of light inside the machine.
The visual elements are crowded into a surface that looks too close for comfort.
The depth of field yields more than a void separating photographer and
viewer. Without a horizon line, flat abstracted areas spread a darkness that en-
croaches on the human form, steadied within a seated rectangle whose slight in-
dentation concentrates the motion upwards to enhance the tension of a vertical
incline. The high contrast articulates figurative parts, but in a way that blends
them with abstract parts. The body and other elements blend into the spaces
around them. Masses of gradient and condensed grey tones distribute weight
across the pictorial field and add momentum to its elements, specifying the field
as an energetic one: encompassing photographer and viewer. Formal funda-
mentals thus set up a shared space that is explored further on as cathartic: an
ambiguous intimacy within a strong composition visually supports a transition be-
tween photographer and viewer via the image, which commemorates the photo-
grapher’s presence of pain in the presence of the viewer. Insofar as the sharing of
pain may ease the burden, this transition is transformative.
The photographer photographs himself, yet bodily closeness need not signify
a metaphorical capture of self. The “I” is a mode of embodying possibilities, crea-
ting the drama that lets the body make meaning, even if no inner essence is there
to express (Butler 1988: 521, 525, 530). Weston’s drama materializes in a capture
of himself by the scanner. Pronouncing the “I” in a series of scanned self-portraits

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entails a repeated interaction that becomes a reenactment: “it is through the ma-
terial support of the photograph that the reenactment takes place as performance:
the performance takes place as photograph” (Schneider 2011: 154). Weston re-
turns to the scanner bed that supports and resists his body—expanding the appa-
ratus of the photographic medium to expand his possibilities of embodiment.
With photographer and viewer coming face to face, the image opens up a
space for catharsis since their proximity invites empathy. A visual cue to this
process is that Weston performs a key action by coming close enough to the
pictorial plane to leave an imprint. The touch creates the image, all but unseen yet
felt by the photographer himself. The image evokes a phenomenological, kinetic
and haptic dimension: “a spatial imaginary” of the blind that extends from the
hand’s reach interwoven with the movement of the body (Paterson 2006: 52, 54,
56). Weston both reaches and moves—actions that shape the image.
The liquid outlines the surface with splashing foam: this soapiness, confirmed
by description and evidence, gains importance with its connotation to clarity and
cleansing. The parts of the image that are whited out are caused by a solution
intended to clear the view, but blocks the eye’s route. A material meant to clear
the way instead gets in the way, rerouting interpretation to account for an aspect
of the image’s visuality and materiality that is disabling: soap in your eyes. The
aesthetic builds on physical circumstances that integrate a performative act: a
unique instance when the liquid signifies an effort to transform a problem, articu-
lated in the repeated gesture of window cleaning.
The liquid connotes catharsis as the cleaning process is captured mid-wash.
Rather than arriving at a clear view, the image recalls the unfinishable clearing of
a disabled eye. Without referring to disability as a biographical and metaphorical
given, it puts the viewer in the situation of the photographer whose impaired sight
echoes in the dirty window. In the frozen repetition of an urge to clean, the image
vacillates between acknowledging the dirtied view and subversively embracing it.
Hand and liquid emphasize each other in a swirl that defines the image by
articulating sharp and blurred bodies in the machine light. This play of light and
dark, of internal and external relations, begins in the gestural touch: skin against
glass, momentarily but still too long. The mundane gesture repeats a symbolic and
constitutive enactment that may count as the stylized repetition that creates the
illusion of a self (Butler 1988: 519). The image occasions the gestures of photo-
grapher and photograph, repeated for the viewers who partake in the operation:
the labor of recognition in images that address selfhood (Schneider 2011: 143,
156). Here, the body is recognized and misrecognized. Following artistic inten-
tion, Sight Unseen curator Douglas McCulloh presents it as “inhumanly vivid and
detailed” due to the specific affordances of scanners, projected as signs of dis-
ability (2009 a: 100). Visual data supports this interpretation since scanning gives
medical associations. Sharp contrast can be perceived as vivid, given the ambi-
guous nuance of aliveness in a context of impairment. As for the inhuman detail,

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this description implies that a representation counted as human needs a rather

ableist look of wholeness to be acceptable.
These signs of impairment are less legible on the body and more performed
in the moment of photographic exposure. For instance, the body is visually both
articulated and disintegrated. Right thumb and index finger blend into the right
side of the face, in turn blending into the neck and the flat dark behind. Left eye
indistinguishable from the face, right eye covered by a lens: a demonstrative refer-
ence to disability yet not apparent as an assistive device. The hand—not the eye,
as a locus of trauma—centers the image in a pull towards the space of the viewer.
An outward momentum reaches through the tops of the swirls, beyond the frame.
The sweep creates an opening where Weston appears. His movement frees up
what would otherwise be covered by the curtain of wet white foam, abstracted
out of a representational reading at the edges of figuration and recognizability.
The sudden clearing makes him visible and seen: he looks out to meet the viewer
looking in—or the other way around—regardless of his level of ability. The body
intertwines into a visual space that it shapes with its gestural motion. The visual
cues, rather than known biographical facts, construct the context of disability.
Movement adds to the image’s context since its horizontal orientation gives
room to expand—180 degrees, the space constituted as a normal field of vision in
photography. While the format reduces a tension associated with verticality, it
also encircles the photographer’s tense relation to the implications of the visual-
ization process. For instance, the discrepancy built into the relation between tech-
nological and human fields of vision and therefore between users locked in an
exchange of denial and benefit with regards to able-bodied sight.
This discrepancy gains meaning if considering the image as an interface: a
shared boundary where different bodies, spaces and phases interact (EB; OED).
In the image, the assistive lens is just one element that hints at discrepancies.
Weston enhances the agency of these discrepancies since it is his gesture that
makes any seeing possible here. Knowing the production process, the glass and
the washing liquid add symbolic value. For instance, the window holds a signifi-
cance to the graphical user interface that mimics the immediacy of perspectival
representation or instead breaks its illusion with a hypermediated construction
(Bolter & Grusin 1999: 21-44). McCulloh suggests that the scanner-as-camera
makes the image both immediate and hyperreal due to the photographer’s proxi-
mity. Weston’s description—“no intervening air, no subterfuge, no escape” (2009
a: 100)—can thus be understood in terms of interfacing. The immediacy of body-
to-glass enhances a hypermediated function that makes viewers aware of their
own experience. Like the hand gesture, this interaction exaggerates the repeated
everyday acts that produces an able user—and a disabled one, whose actions in
this case makes the image possible (Butler 1988: 519, 525).
The image’s visual and material facticity find support in its title. Peering
keeps the eyes less than fully open: a tentative gaze, perhaps difficult, less than

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optimized. The affinity between peering and squinting connotes disability, but
includes a range of sightedness. Peering is trying to see rather than taking visual
control, countering the intellectual control addressed further on as implied in the
notion of inner vision that is habitually ascribed to visually impaired artists. This
image visualizes seeing neither as a gift nor a curse, but as labor: intense work.
Peering takes place from somewhere to somewhere else: the individual who
peers engages in the environment to which the peering is directed yet not fully
revealed. The word darkness locates the environment and the word through locates
the undisclosed transition: navigating darkness. The character of the darkness—
deeply ocular yet polyvalent—is signaled by the assistive lens, enabling a view
towards the viewer but obscuring the eye from them. Moreover, the viewer is
positioned opposite the photographer with several layers—lens, scanner bed,
pictorial plane—dividing a space that could be shared if considering that the foam
on the glass is blinding on both sides. The viewer may be invited to share the
darkness with the photographer. At the same time, each is the other’s other.
This analysis shows that the visual aesthetics add to an experience of what
the title and other statements explicate—and more. The title emphasizes distance
harbored in contrasts that clash and blend against the wet glass, while suggesting
an immanent yet ambiguous shift for which the image functions as a testing
ground. What is tested here is a mode of seeing that ceases to be hidden and claims
the open space: from peering to seeing, through and beyond a darkness that
equates impairment with failure. Rather than restoring sight to a normative ideal,
the image expands into a moment when failure is met with poise. The work con-
tinues. The image embodies a process of trying, neither to approximate a norm
nor to break it but to communicate seeing as an ongoing labor: a daily navigation.

Catharsis: Purity or Mess

In these photographs, I turn myself into an object, a stigmatized object. I try to
make myself look inhuman, grotesque.
The focus of this work is not only to illustrate physical vision loss, but also an
inner journey involving my fears and emotions about becoming totally blind.
This is a journey towards infinite darkness in which physical sight is dimin-
ished and obscured but artistic vision, my blind vision, is enhanced. […]
[A] synergy of the physical (corporeal) experience framed within the context
of a metaphysical journey to form a unique vision beyond sight.
Kurt Weston presents Blind Vision as an expression of the physical and
psychological hardship of becoming blind (McCulloh 2009 a: 100; Weston:
website). A similar blending of art and life, with both rooted in disability, is
notable in Douglas McCulloh’s presentation (2009 b: 27):
He suffered through debilitating experimental HIV/AIDS treatments, but in
1996 doctors gave him only a few months to live. Surgical implants into his

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eyes, intended to prevent his sight from deteriorating, backfired and almost
completely destroyed his vision. […] Small wonder that Weston’s subsequent
photos express feelings of anger, loss, and the stigma of disease and decay.
These quotes exemplify the trope of stigma as a sensitization that counteracts vul-
nerability: a visual bodily mark that symbolically empowers its bearer. The
discourse around Weston’s images empowers the marks of his identification:
homosexuality, AIDS, blindness. Such marks are routinely punished by a society
that demands a normative identity performance (Butler 1988: 154).
Weston’s images and the statements about them become performative by em-
phasizing vulnerability and transcendence. The repeated verbal display of stigma,
and its overcoming, affirm catharsis as an idealized state of purity. However, this
image brings about a catharsis that gains its value by being initiated but always
pending: it stays in-between. Similarly, Weston’s work repeats his painful past by
making it present, returning to photography as a space where his “here” meets a
viewer’s “here.” This space is the space of the audience who witnesses catharsis,
situated with empathy between one’s self and other selves. The witness, off-center
from the main event yet more than a bystander, is a viewer position here since it
acts and re-acts upon the visuality implied in the definition of catharsis (EB):
Through experiencing fear vicariously in a controlled situation, the spectator’s
own anxieties are directed outward, and, through sympathetic identification
with the tragic protagonist, his insight and outlook are enlarged.
The pivot here is to see and be seen: looking within, back, and around more than
looking at. In this process, photographer and photograph connect in a “dynamic
of witness” (Schneider 2011: 140). The dynamic conflates the notion of photo-
graphy as a that-was-there with a having-been-distracted or a will-be-around-
later. As a memory technique, photographs repeat an elusive pastness: they mold
memory, add and take away, and let us forget what they can or cannot keep. At
the same time, they are well suited to reconfigure the past since a constant supply
of memories provide a past to hold on to. McCulloh’s claim that “photographers—
commonly viewed as specialized seers—are perhaps the blindest people of all”
(2009 a: 4) hints at the mnemonic dilemma as a result of adapting to conventions
that educate the eye. As a commemorative practice, photography is persistent yet
corrosive: the now that holds memory is reshaped with each new viewer who
remembers the image’s memory. This motion destabilizes the essence that is a
premise of the true seer’s inner vision.
The pivot occurs between bodies codified as able or disabled using norms
about visuality that integrate physical faculty, cultural act, and socio-political visi-
bility. To perceive of Weston’s viewer, and not just himself, as a witness invites
interplay between visual modes constituted as different. McCulloh ties this role to
the photographer whose “[s]imple witnessing is the purest kind of creation,”
thereby positing the witness not as an agent of catharsis but a catalyst that may

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change a situation but not change itself (2009 a: 3). Another, more cathartic, mu-
tuality comes through when he calls the work “a participatory document from a
marginalized world” in reference to a photographic tradition of social critique
(2009 a: 100). While the dynamic of witness unsettles a fixed state of marginal-
ization, the margin functions to mark the boundaries of how disability is defined.
Definitions of disability resemble definitions of catharsis: from medical
cleanse to social reconstruction, a surpassing of limits that seems positive even if
painful. Shifting the problem, from individuals defined as disabled to environ-
ments that produce such definitions, opens up for a culture-oriented focus on me-
diation—and disrupted mediation, explored in the next section on tactical glitches
(Siebers 2008: 54, 188-190; McRuer 2018: 19). In relation to medical, social, and
cultural models of disability, a conceptual merging of eye and mind enforces a
false opposition between mind and matter that makes blindness as a metaphor less
embodied than cerebral. If ideas about a nature of seeing are central, its visceral
messiness is not. Priority is set on a superior mind to deal with a failed body as if
the eyes disintegrate from the body to assert intellectual control over it, echoing
the tension between innate knowledge and sensory experience in debates on
blindness (Paterson 2006: 52). Such individualistic superiority reveals an under-
lying ableism: a narrative of overcoming where disability is a portal into magical
powers by which to defeat disability (Siebers 2008: 63; McRuer 2018: 20-21).
Kurt Weston’s images and statements about them slide between these positions
when a physical ailment becomes a metaphysical asset. When losing sight becomes
a premise for insight, a troubling hierarchy emerges (McCulloh 2009 b: 1):
Sight Unseen presents work by the world’s most accomplished blind photo-
graphers as they explore ideas about the nature of seeing. Great art, it has been
said, is not a product of the eyes, but of the mind. […] Similarly, the artists of
Sight Unseen, in bringing their inner visions into the world of the sighted, reveal
a rich visual and emotionally complex blending of the physical and conceptual
worlds.
This statement operates performatively to establish a new canon using the label
blind photographers. Linking to canonized impaired artists like Beethoven serves
to legitimize the participants in a context where disability falls outside the norms
of society but inside the norms of art—situated as non-normative much like a
stereotypical avant-garde. The ancient Greek ranking of sight as the ideal sense is
recalled in references to a blind prophet, and to art as a practice that brings out
the mystery of the physical world (Paterson 2006: 55; McCulloh 2009 a: 6). If
modern and contemporary art seek to represent abrasive differences, art about or
by disabled bodies changes the representational process itself (Siebers 2008: 54).
The avant-garde trope thus supports activist mediations of disability. It links to
catharsis in Weston’s work, and to art’s performativity as it engages the bodies of
audience members who respond and remember with empathy (Schneider 2011:
135).

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Rather than invite a range of responses, the idealization of the eye as a site
of trauma increases the mental distance to traumatic experiences. When the state-
ments invoke trauma to validate art without visual cues, the shift from embodied
sight (however it is) to inner (perfect) vision therefore narrows the image’s
potential to shape discourse. Weston foregrounds the eyes’ capacities yet con-
fronts any nature of seeing as deeply cultural. His work critiques a distance that
underlines the interpretation of images created by visually impaired photo-
graphers, echoing the devalorization of corporeality in idealist notions of art
(Siebers 2006: 63-64, 67; 2008: 12). Such idealism emerges in allusions to the
superior inner vision of blind photographers (McCulloh 2009 a: 2-7; b: 1):
Blind photographers operate at the heart of the medium; they are the zero point
of photography. These artists occupy the pure, immaculate center—image as
idea, idea as image.
Close to a presupposed heart, a zero point connotes essence (2009 a: 2, 6). Pure
and immaculate, it implies that disability causes a purer kind of seeing. An ableist
assumption about normality is thus turned upside down, reproducing an essential-
ized difference that denies diversity. Blind photographers cannot be just photo-
graphers if they are singled out because of their blindness, even if it is stipulated
as a heightened state instead of a diminished one. A range of states and practices
are falsely unified in favor of a seeing that non-blind people miss out on by default,
even if most of them—us—become disabled too in some way at some point.
The blend of physical and conceptual worlds, given as a unique contribution
by visually impaired photographers, cannot be shared when this special blend is
assigned a more authentic realness than anyone else can attain. Weston’s image
embodies a more complex reality, one that is unstable yet scripted through the
actions of individuals who both reproduce it and constitute it as reality (Butler
1988: 526-527). As the analysis shows, the reality effect of photography comes
with a dramatized representation rather than with a record of something pre-
existing (Iversen 2007: 93). Weston’s note on realness is sharp yet open: “This is
your new reality. This is your strange new flesh. Let’s take a look” (McCulloh
2009 a: 100). Again, the dynamic of witness noted in the image is found to begin
just there: in the image. By observing vision while disregarding a preset normality,
Weston’s vision traces the usual cycle towards decay and death—albeit sped up.
While acknowledging the hint of catharsis in statements on Kurt Weston’s
work, this analysis diverges from them on the point of purity as a purpose of
catharsis. Drawing out a consequence of the image’s function as an invitation to
take a vulnerable position, the argument here is that the image rather recalls the
cathartic process as always pending. Moreover, the statements exemplify a valid-
ation of inner vision following a loss of a property posited as outer vision. Since
they signify the outer as shallow and temporary, it loses validity in favor of the
inner. Outer and inner appear different in a similar way as ability and disability.
Yet, turning the dichotomy around does not change the underlying polarization

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of what is uncontrollably diverse. Inner vision appears abstract, disembodied,

static—a position from where no movement is needed, desired or possible: the end
stop. Based on the image, catharsis happens instead in the unfinished labor with
and within the impure: the mess of life. The cathartic quality comes about through
messiness, which gives the image a tactical potential by staying in-process—not
by tidying up to present a pure image of pure vision, whether inner or outer.

Tactics: To Resist a Disabling System

My limited visual acuity—total blindness in my left eye and limited peripheral
vision, no central vision, in my right eye permits me to see the world much like
it appears in an impressionist painting.
On Kurt Weston’s website, illness—in his more urgent wording: disease—per-
vades the narration of the images, but with an unsentimental straightforwardness
that gives nuance to the tone of urgency recurring to explain his oeuvre. If the
artist relates health and art without reducing one to the other, Douglas McCulloh
describes this relation with dystopian intensity (2009 a: 100):
Threat and decay is Weston’s daily world. It’s been a bitter battle just to stay
in this world, so he’s not about to flinch now or look away.
In Journeys through Darkness, a biography explicitly both about Weston and about
AIDS, the artist’s medical experiences are interwoven with his art. The chapter
Blind Vision marks the importance of the series and of the selected image whose
title resembles the book’s title. With Weston’s deteriorating health and botched
treatments as a narrative engine, the author keeps a focus on trauma. For instance,
her recapitulation of one gruesome and unsuccessful therapy—medication
injected into the eye—echoes in images where Weston holds instruments like a
syringe up close to his eyes (Oswald 2012: 115-116).
These statements present Weston’s practice like an ennobling quest: they re-
fit the pain of blindness as a hurdle needed to reach inner vision. The biographical
interpretation leaves the image to illustrate the quest, unmoored from the visual-
ization that merits the emphasis on biography in the first place. The discursive
frame thus settles around a void, as the story is retold by reusing an image source
that is evident yet unaddressed. Yet, photographer and photograph could go out-
side their initial narratives to reach other individuals who deal with their own
pains. Weston’s image neither collectivizes experiences of pain nor isolates them
as insular representations of individuality, but acknowledges them as both social
constitutions and individual embodiments. Therefore, it transforms the private
physicality of pain into a shared situation that is empowering also on cultural and
political levels (Siebers 2008: 60-61, 188-189, 193; Butler 1988: 522). The image
alerts the viewer to how individuals perform ableist norms about individuality and
challenge them by sharing diverse ways of being (an) individual.

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This double quality gives Weston’s image a tactical potential. Tactics em-
power individuals to resist a dominating socio-cultural system by acting out of line
with it (de Certeau 1984: xvii-xxiv, 34-39). Such acting out of line could happen
while taking photographs: making statements that in their individuality cite and
thus reveal a “structural unconscious” (Iversen 2007: 97). The system is embodied
in individuals who perform its rules. Weston’s image makes the rules visible as his
own body performs them, an unruly body that challenges an ableist system by not
aligning with it.
Tactical misalignment is found in practices like glitch art, which questions
the structures that power the network society by exploiting its technical errors
(Kelly 2009: 285-295; Krapp 2011: 53-54, 67-68). The operative and symbolic
principle in these structures are protocols: they organize the networked life-world,
pervasive yet vulnerable to disruptions that reveal the performative logic of the
system (Galloway 2004: 74-75, 122, 175-176, 241-246). A protocol resembles a
script: both reproduce reality through individuals “acting in concert and acting in
accord” yet who can still find some leeway (Butler 1988: 525-526). Protocols and
scripts are tools of biopower: norms that both constitute and correct deviations,
and therefore produce disability (Hirschmann & Smith 2016: 274-275). Like
protocols or scripts, these norms correct the disabling moment of a glitch—a dis-
ruption that is both technical and social.
Such corrective measures recall that the able body is required in systems of
labor. In these systems, a rhetoric of choice covers up the fact that there is none.
As with glitching, the tactic is to reveal both the disruption as something broken
and reveal that brokenness as a contingent part of everyday life (McRuer 2006:
8, 30; 2018: 23; Siebers 2008: 67). While the broken body is idealized in the state-
ments here, it functions in Weston’s image as a tactic that reveals the mechanisms
of identity formation—whether these favor the broken or the unbroken.
Glitches act against the protocol if they force a system into an “injured, sore,
and unguarded condition” (Galloway 2004: 206, 175). The situation evokes the
roots of glitch: to lose balance in a slippery place (EB; OED). A tactical potential
ascribed to technical errors is grounded in individual acts. Error can therefore be
redefined as a systemic friction on an experiential level, as it empowers a tactical
spectatorship (Grundell 2016) that resists absorption into mediation (Betancourt
2014). Glitches reach into the structure that organizes performance. Once re-
vealed, users can identify vulnerabilities that ableist norms do not support. Users
thus take physical part in the system. Systems depend on their labor—especially
a neo-liberal system, in which passing as normal and being represented as such is
crucial (Schneider 2011: 137-138, 156, 160). In this way, Weston’s peering counts
as labor too. Any user fails to cleanly repeat their script, their protocol. Impaired
users call out both dependence and disruption by living with systemic friction.
Weston’s work is thus situated as a tactic against normative mediation.

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To be injured, sore and unguarded characterizes a vulnerability noted across

a technologized life-world (Lagerkvist 2016). As a key exponent of this life-world,
photography is inscribed with vulnerability from the apparatus preset to steer user
choices to the tracking and exposure of users once their images enter the digital
flow. Photographs—particularly digital, like Weston’s scans—are already part of
a system that enforces a heteronormative ideal based on narrow categories, i.e.
“the binarized borders marking living from dead, present from past” (Schneider
2011: 141-142). Since no body is able enough in a binary system, all users are
vulnerable. An in-between mode thus works as a queering—cripping—tactic.
According to Weston, his work is fueled by a need to put an “exclamation
point” on an urgent situation (McCulloh 2009 a: 100). An exclamation point is
like the sudden alert of a glitch—and like a photographic punctum. They point
out that which snags and chafes, within an image and its interpretive frame: here,
the normative structures that shape how individuals become visible (2009 a: 100):
“I am the stigmatized person,” says Weston. “I am the disabled body… I’ve
seen the people stare. Now, I’m blind and hold onto my partner and
I feel the people staring.”
While the quote refers to Weston’s everyday life, the image performs a disabling
situation more than it displays traits of disability. The disruption experienced by
the viewer as a witness of pain links to the disruption experienced by the photo-
grapher who is in pain. They are linked in the image, where Weston places himself
as a stigmatized object—a glitched body, glitching the system that stigmatizes
him.
Weston’s consistent visualization of a “stigmatized object” tactically crips dis-
courses of both ability and disability by addressing a social codification of vulner-
ability. Doing so, the body and the image where it appears act like a glitch: it
reveals the precarious normality inscribed in the basic systems of society by
creating a break that makes the system visible to itself. The glitch thus shares its
disruptive function with the hypermediated interface, shown in the analysis to be
an important part of Peering through the Darkness. A glitched body functions like a
hypermediated interface towards the system, embodying the tactical refusal to
adapt to its normal operation. Revealing its own vulnerability, it calls attention to
the vulnerability contingent in society. This contingency cannot be countered by
excluding every vulnerable body: i.e., every body.
As systems and individuals situated by them fail to optimize, their broken-
ness shapes processes of being and becoming—whether to make broken bodies
perform better (Hirschmann & Smith 2016: 269-270) or to glitch that normative
performance by subverting identity markers like gender (Sundén 2015). Accept-
ing the body as always already broken refutes the existence of a pure essence
located in a pure past where disability never happened: an imagined (and imaged)
distortion of a former truer state of normality (Hirschmann & Smith 2016: 269,

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Vendela Grundell Navigating Darkness

280). Moreover, interior essence does not predetermine either self or body since
both form as “punitively regulated cultural fictions” (Butler 1988: 521-522, 528).
Kurt Weston’s image is tactical as it performs the protocol of two bodies: that
of the photographer and that of the photograph. It also counteracts these proto-
cols by revealing how disabling systems have to be interfaced with constantly. The
image captures and transforms a disabling moment as a moment of glitching: the
wet glass is literally a slippery place, signifying the loss of balance after losing
sight. The foam disables the lens, signifying the photographer’s eye as it cannot
be removed without a decisive yet uncontrollable act: swiping it away. The foam-
covered glass gains a performative function as it brings out the disruptive presence
of the lens in relation to the glitch in the lens of the bodily eye—and invites the
viewer to vicariously test Weston’s seeing mode. The point where the impact of
slipperiness pierces the viewer—the punctum—could therefore be found in the
liquid dispersing in the gesture that creates a shared state of disability. Weston’s
image draws the viewer into a process he cannot control or see as an able-bodied
viewer could. He subverts the function of his material, so that the visual assistance
sabotages a clear view. The viewer can observe the sabotage, the trace of systemic
friction. While technology itself is not glitched, but only slightly modified and
misused, he replicates a glitched mediation to visualize his experience of not just
being blind—status quo—but becoming blind: a reenactment of pain both past
and alive. An experience of being glitched thus becomes disabling in a way that is
not restricted to disabled bodies.
Glitches, exclamation points and punctums are performative since their re-
peated exposure builds friction over time: one now after another. They disrupt the
viewer with “a sudden phenomenological intrusion”—glitchers and photo-
graphers both engage in “inviting and reacting to conditions that allow the art to
happen” by “reinfecting that which technological advancement has made sterile”
(Manon & Temkin 2011: § 15, 33, 46, 55). With Kurt Weston’s practice forming
around illness, embodied within and between bodies, infection exceeds metaphor.
His activist portraits target “people who are infected and affected… witnesses [of]
the world’s disquietude about the most significant dilemma of the 21st century”
(website). These witnesses lead the cathartic process, as the quote points to how
vulnerable bodies threaten a social order by revealing and resisting its norms. The
glitch ripples through the system: in bodies infected within and by discourse—
and reinfecting it by reshaping their visual presence. A glitched body points to an
able body as glitchable: not-yet-glitched.

Otherness: From Exclusion to Empowerment

First, being gay, then having AIDS, and now being blind. It’s been like a
journey into otherness. A lot of my work aims to show that all of us are the
other… We are all headed toward decay and disability.

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Vendela Grundell Navigating Darkness

With these words, Kurt Weston situates his photographs as materializations of

otherness in three ways (McCulloh 2009 a: 100). He consolidates a brutal yet
nuanced frankness in his interrogation of a painful life: a process of remembering
pain without releasing it. The quote suggests that this activity is performed alone
and together: a shared otherness that lets nobody escape from vulnerability.
While the image is straightforward yet not simplistic, the implication of ideal-
izing vulnerability need further address. One such implication is that vulnerability
is integrated into ableist cultural fantasies about people with AIDS and disability:
“already dead or better off dead” (McRuer 2006: 20). A related implication is who
the image makes vulnerable. The photographer is vulnerable as he hinges his
statement on impairment, owning his vulnerability by conferring it to a system
that conditions his statement. The viewer is vulnerable when confronted with a
private proximity to impairment, yet may be constituted as more able than the
individual whose images stir the confrontation. The system is vulnerable since it
is glitchable—but it also contains disruptions. Glitches thus recall the otherness
in Weston’s narrative, pointing out that vulnerability pervades the socio-cultural
structure and therefore serves as a tactical activity. It embraces brokenness rather
than trying to transcend it like the statements do. If the image behaves like a glitch,
the statements do what systems do to glitches: neutralize disruption by bypassing
its root—in this case, the corporeality of the image.
Weston’s image insists on a broken corporeality that brings forth a disrupted
subject, more so than the verbal statements which recapitulate the transcendence
of trauma by a perfectly intact subject. The image’s visuality partly mirrors the
discourse, and partly critiques its idealist undercurrents. The analysis suggests
that the image visualizes the process of dealing with trauma more than trauma
itself. This visualization is not a static reference to Kurt Weston’s biography. It
unfolds towards an unfinished catharsis, a process in which the photographer and
the viewer together engage in the tactic of embracing otherness that emerges in
the operation of the image. Disability may function as “an othering other” that
underlines the otherness of the able body too (Siebers 2008: 6, 60).
The image gains a performative capacity to speak for its creator, its contexts
and its unstable selves—to speak of private pain that causes difference but can
still be shared. The shared difference unfolds between the body in the image and
the body that responds to it. As difference is experienced and identified through
mediation, bodies codified as different may be deemed valuable insofar as they
mark their own borders “for the benefit of mainstream society” (Siebers 2008: 56.
See also Siebers 2008: 17, 190; Hirschmann and Smith 2016: 278). The statements
about Kurt Weston’s work mark that border by repeating a narrative about over-
coming a difference caused by pain. The image marks it explicitly only with the
lens, shown in the analysis as more ambiguous and thus more productive.
Singular yet relational, the image articulates difference as it finds a more or
less sighted viewer. At the other end, otherness is reciprocated in other ways. I

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Vendela Grundell Navigating Darkness

partake in the image’s performativity as it acknowledges other—my—vulnerabili-

ties: I live with chronic migraine. Like the critique of mainstream benefits above,
my experience may amount to “a normative epiphany” of someone who affirms
their own able-bodiedness as the encounter with other bodies—particularly queer
and disabled bodies—stirs a crisis (McRuer 2006: 12-13, 16). I claim no illusory
leverage on crip identities yet argue for a possible sharing of a cathartic process
that remains always pending, as a position of alliance from which pain can expand
beyond its private enclosure (Siebers 2008: 189; McRuer 2018: 24).
In its own ways, disability discourse marks borders too: around which kind
of otherness belongs to it and how it should be represented. However, Weston’s
image lifts out of its discursively encouraged position as mediator of a restricted
vulnerability when it invites the viewer to turn towards all kinds of disabling
situations with self-reflexivity. Otherness is neither lamented nor idealized – but
empowering. With an explicit self-reflexivity in the verbal statements, their per-
formative effect on image and viewer could share the cathartic quality that the
image already has. The image would then have a place—a body—in which to land
that goes amiss with the emphasis on transcending the body. Repeating the trope
of pure inner vision, the statements thus counteract the image. The former do not
heed the latter’s call to act on what one sees: attention to visual evidence is needed
in order to do that. The look performed in this analysis sees Weston’s image ex-
tending beyond illustration of biography to mediate an embodiment that is com-
plex yet participatory.
The image fulfills Kurt Weston’s aim of “holding life” (website). To hold life
is to hold time: this is what photographs do. The analysis suggests that the image
holds a moment of pain in its fluid state: as a process through which the pained
individual keeps navigating. Memory is a slippery place, ripe with glitchy
moments where the what-has-been could become a what-will-be: where a mourn-
ful commemoration could become an interrogative exploration. Weston’s work
implies that what will be is more pain. He peers into darkness rather than through
it, approaching blindness while the image meets a viewer whose sight disappears
too soon enough. His work positions him at an angle from the contradictory and
inadvertent ableist tendency that, at its extreme, echoes a position “that can only
imagine… people with disabilities as very special people”—a position that shapes
flexible subjects who “manage the crisis” of the able-bodied without being re-
cognized as equals (McRuer 2006: 17, 41).
In this analysis, the image shows Kurt Weston not managing a crisis of his
own or of any others. From the safe space of art, his self-portrait is an inspiringly
inflexible act with, upon, against and beyond pain in the past and in the present.
As the core of this case study, it makes visible a way to act both with and against
the discourses that frame us as individuals and communities by calling out how
our own seeing is implicated in negotiations about normativity. In conclusion: an
effective and topical tactic to navigate different darknesses.

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Vendela Grundell Navigating Darkness

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