A blind photographer. It sounds like a joke, or a novelty turn. But though Aids has robbed John Dugdale of his sight, he is still producing outstanding work, writes Ben Widdicombe
John Dugdale lives in one of New York City’s prettiest streets, a curving brownstone avenue lined with lazy trees and 100-year-old town houses. The Chelsea skyline is visible through the conservatory of his top-floor apartment, where turn-of-the-century Americana sits side by side with his collection of antique glass and porcelain. It’s all so beautiful, it’s a shame he can’t see it.
Dugdale is almost blind. Ask him how much sight he has and he makes an eye shape with his thumb and forefinger, poking through the bottom with the tip of his pinky.
“Oh, about that much in one eye,” says this handsome 37-year-old artist. “It’s difficult for me to estimate. Between 1993 and 1994 I lost more than three- quarters of my sight; I have a little bit out of the bottom of my left eye, but it’s very blurry. I don’t know what things look like, but I can see their shape.”
In June, Dugdale spent two weeks taking photographs in Britain, completing almost 100 landscapes and interior studies. Nature and Spirit, the show resulting from this work, has just opened at Hamiltons gallery in London. In a year that has also seen his pictures exhibited in New York, Rome and Sydney, the former magazine photographer reflects that it took the loss of his sight to turn him into an internationally recognised artist.
“I tested HIV positive in 1985, but I was always very healthy,” says Dugdale, whose blindness is caused by a related condition called CMV. “I thought it was the end of my commercial career, but as a way to make my family feel better I said, `Don’t worry, I’ll be a great blind art photographer.’ They were surprised that I said it, and so was I. But I realised I had enough chutzpah to continue making pictures. Even with zero sight I had every intention of recording what went on in my life.”
As his sight dwindled, Dugdale came to rely on assistants to focus his camera and set up shots. For composition he uses a combination of intuition and his memory of other artwork, often putting himself in the pictures so he gets the right pose.
“I have a full, clear visual picture of everything I photograph,” he says. “That really starts inside my head, because eyesight and vision are completely different. I felt very happy and safe when I realised my vision was totally intact. It’s just that my mechanical sight isn’t working as well as it used to.” Able to make out the dim outlines of buildings or natural features in strong daylight, Dugdale relies on touch to establish details such as texture. Once he’s felt an object or studied part of it with a magnifying glass, he can “see” it in his mind.
“I can tell what is in front of me from the light and the object’s shape and from the hundred questions I ask people, and then I compose the shot in a very geometric way. Describing things to people when they’re doing the framing for me, I have to break it down to the simplest kind of composition, because that’s what people understand. You can’t really communicate a photographic style or an `eye’ to people, but what happened was that the simplicity of the photographs turned into their style.”
Blindness has forced Dugdale to concentrate on immediately available subjects, like his family, his antiques and his house in upstate New York. It was the classic feel of his art that two years ago attracted the attention of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Malcolm Daniel, the associate curator of photography, was involved in the decision to buy a photograph of Dugdale’s country house, shot outdoors and inverted through the “lens” of a 19th-century glass vase. “This photograph expresses something about photography itself, and the way the world we’ve created is reflected through art,” Daniel says. “What particularly appealed to us was the element of self-referentiality – it seemed to be about photography, and about light and images, and the way the vase itself acts as a lens to show the wider world that you don’t actually see in the camera itself.”
Daniel insists that Dugdale is not a novelty act. “It’s not like the person who paints with their toes, where you say, `Isn’t it remarkable for somebody who doesn’t have hands to be able to do that just with their feet. His deteriorating eyesight makes him more conscious of certain effects of light and shadow that are essential to his work. The intellectual sensitivity has been heightened by the dimming of his vision.”
Dugdale is clear about the meaning of his work. “My pictures are so accessible. They’re about sadness, joy, beauty, death, life. All straightforward, unfettered emotions,” he says, admitting to having run the gamut of those emotions himself. As Aids began to eat away at his quality of life, fear gave way to bouts of depression.
Dugdale’s first book, Lengthening Shadows Before Nightfall, was published in 1994 and dealt with his feelings at a time when doctors gave him less than a year to live.
“There wasn’t a specific message in the book, but there was a sense of calm and tranquillity, because after struggling with the disease I had to prepare to pass away. Every time my friends and family came, I had to say goodbye to them. At first I was hysterical, but towards the end I realised there wasn’t anything I could do by being insane, so I relaxed.”
Dugdale’s health improved with new therapies, and the book drew attention to his use of techniques and equipment that seem more at home in a history book than the studio of a contemporary artist. The distinctive blue of his work is the result of making cyanotypes, a developing process pioneered in 1842.
“I’ve probably made more cyanotypes than anybody else in the country,” he says. “I started with the blues because they were easy. But then I saw how people responded to them, that combination of science and nature and art, and for the past three or four years I’ve tried to make them bluer and bluer. I’d like to see out this century with the biggest body of cyanotypes that I can.”
In addition to the antiquated process, Dugdale uses a 1912 camera in the field and shoots studio work with a 112kg, 63-year-old behemoth that looks like the prototype for one of HG Wells’s Martian walking machines.
“I like the idea that the piece of glass the image is being transferred through has some history to it. I like to imagine some of the things that the lens might have seen, like a sort of continuum. I would use a daguerrotype if I could.”