[accessibleimage] photgraphy and painting

two articles and two links
http://www.magicvalley.com/news/worldnation/index.asp?StoryID=12202
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/Stories/0,1413,206~22097~2720389,00.html

links
http://www.visualpartho.com/blindphotoresource.htm 
http://www.tsbvi.edu/Education/photog.htm

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/Stories/0,1413,206~22097~2720389,00.html

Disabilities no obstacle for these artists

By Susan Abram , Staff Writer

NEWHALL -- Theirs is a friendship forged without any formal
handshakes or visual recognition. 
Joe Caron lost his hands. O. Quintin DiMaria lost his
eyesight. 

But the men will say they have gained admiration for one
another's love of the paint and the brush, of white canvas
transformed into cherry trees bursting with pink blossoms,
blond desert roads dotted with hunter green chaparral, and
deep blue oceans that meet a magenta horizon. 

"He's my hands, and I'm his eyes,' says Caron as DiMaria
visited him one afternoon. "That's the way it works.' 

For DiMaria and Caron, painting is more than just a way to
pass the time through their twilight years. It has brought
them together in a most unsuspecting way, with each amazed
at how the other can recreate beauty without eyes to see
color or hands to direct a brush. They are each other's
biggest fans. 

"When I found out how he painted, I couldn't believe it, '
DiMaria said. 

Their friendship began five years ago at a senior adult
apartment complex in Newhall. 

DiMaria, 86, lives in Unit 223. Caron, 82, and his wife,
Dorothy, moved into Unit 221. 

The two were drawn together by the styles in which each
other painted. 

DiMaria, a former advertising manager for The Wall Street
Journal, said he always liked to draw. On one of his walls
is a detailed pencil sketching of his shiny Army boots from
1947. He took up painting seriously just before his doctor
declared him legally blind in 1994 due to macular
degeneration. To compromise for his visual loss of detail,
his teacher at the local art school said he should try to
paint like the impressionist Monet, who used dabs of blended
color to suggest a tree, a flower or a lily pad. She helps
him mix the paints, he said. 

"Greens, blues and browns, they all look like black to me,'
DiMaria said recently as he stood in front of dozens of his
paintings, mostly landscapes, he had hung on his wall. "I
can only see yellow. But my teacher thinks I paint better
now than when I could see better.' 

Caron lost his hands while working in a sheet-metal factory
in Massachusetts. He was 24. 

"It was a blessing in disguise,' he said. "I was careless.' 

Caron had always liked to sketch, too. He learned to paint
reading art books by Walter Foster, but after his accident,
he had to re-learn how to control a brush with his
artificial limbs. He holds the brush between metal clamps
and moves his body as he would his wrists, to direct the
acrylic paints he uses. His first painting of orchids still
hangs on his wall, as do several others, mostly the faces of
clowns and American Indians. 

DiMaria said he admires the details he can make out in some
of Caron's work, the fragile black strings on a violin, and
the soft blades of grass on sand. 

"It's so fascinating to watch him,' said his wife, Dorothy.
"He goes into all these different positions with his body
while he paints.' 

The two men don't sell their art. DiMaria has donated his to
local organizations as well as to his nieces and nephews.
Caron gives them away to his children. 

And neither likes to dwell on what he has lost. 

"What was I going to do?' DiMaria shrugs, "Lay down and die?
Painting relaxes me.' 

"It puts you in another world,' Caron continues. "You don't
think about things that bother you.' 

The two men visit frequently, often meeting in the
downstairs lobby of their apartment complex for what they
call an "organ recital.' 

"You know,' DiMaria says laughing when a visitor inquires
about it, "an organ recital, as in, 'Oh, my liver hurts! Oh,
my kidneys hurt! Oh, my heart hurts!'' 

Dorothy Caron rolls her eyes as the two men laugh. 

"It's not so funny when you've heard it a dozen times,' she
says. "But if you've got a sense of humor about things, then
you've got the world by its tail.'






   WORLD/NATIONAL NEWS

 Mostly Blind Photographer Develops a Singular Vision
   Originally published Tuesday, February 22, 2005
   Los Angeles Times
 LOS ANGELES -- It wasn't until he went blind that Michael
Richard found his photographic vision.

 That's how the Studio City photographer describes what
happened after he lost virtually all his sight three years
ago.

 Surgery to remove a tumor behind one of his eyes left him
able to see only gauzy, indistinct shapes. Richard, 57, felt
that
 his days as a scenic and documentary photographer were
over.

 "I figured photography was out of the picture. I couldn't
see to focus. So how could I shoot photos?" he reasoned.

 But a visit to the Braille Institute in Los Angeles to
learn to use his white cane unexpectedly led to his becoming
an
 acclaimed abstract-art photographer.

 Richard was startled to find that the agency offered a
photography class. On a whim, he signed up.

 "You sure don't think of photography when you think of the
Braille Institute," he said. "I was thinking that it would
probably
 be a lecture course, something covering the history of
photography."

 Richard, whose primary occupation is as a musician, had
specialized in nature photography before surgery in early
2002
 to remove a malignant tumor left him sightless in his right
eye. Born with a condition called acute amblyopia that made
 his left eye basically nonfunctional, he suddenly found
himself unable to see anything distinctly.

 For a visual artist, it was devastating.

 Richard could make out shapes only with his left eye.
Objects in front of him were ethereal and diffused, as if
viewed
 through glass smeared with petroleum jelly.

 "It's like the world is a very Impressionistic painting,"
he said. "Only the broadest of lines are shown -- it's like
the most
 extreme soft-focus photo that you can imagine."

 So he wasn't expecting much when he enrolled in the photo
class taught by former Life magazine photographer Jack
 Birns.

 "I was anticipating that this was going to be a joke,"
Richard said. "How can the blind take pictures?"

 Birns was quick to build confidence among his 10 students.
They could use automatic-focus cameras and commercial
 film processing, he promised. They would find plenty of
pleasure in pointing and shooting.

 Richard remembers being pleased when he got his first roll
of film back. There were lines and forms that even he could
 make out.

 Sighted viewers of his pictures praised their composition.
He'd not lost his feel for photography, they assured him.

 Richard's wife, graphic artist Patrice Hughes, began
driving him around Los Angeles to potential photo sites.
>From the
 start, he decided to leave his white cane at home when
carrying his camera.

 He had learned through a self-defense class at the Braille
Institute that blind people are often targeted by thieves,
 Richard said.

 "You can't run from anybody trying to rob you," he said.
"You can't chase anybody, either."

 Richard carries a magnifying glass to help him adjust the
settings on his Nikon 35-mm camera. A magnified monocular
 helps him find distant subjects to photograph. He often
paces off the distance between them and his camera in order
to
 set the proper focus.

 He develops black-and-white film himself and prints his own
20-by-24-inch enlargements at a public photo lab.

 "I have to use both my monocular and my magnifier just to
see if the negative is in the enlarger's carrier. I find a
sharp
 edge in the picture and get in real close on the easel with
my magnifier to focus the enlarger. Sighted people who use
the
 lab have learned not to walk too close to me in the
darkroom," he said.

 His blow-up prints depicting shadows from a window falling
across a tile floor, for example, and balconies marching in
 rows across the side of a skyscraper and rain puddles on
pavement show Richard's skills at powerful abstract
 composition.

 In the last two years, his photographs have been shown in
nearly a dozen exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco and
 Philadelphia.

 "He's learned to adapt to his loss," said Christine Leahey,
director of the Santa Monica-based "The View From Here"
 organization, which showcases art of the visually impaired.
She estimates that 100 such photographers are working in
 the state.

 It was Richard and his photographs that motivated her to
start the nonprofit group, Leahey said.

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