100 Years of Blindness: A Scented Performance Lecture on Photography by Leona Godin
Saturday, March 1, 2025, 7pm
Tuesday, April 15, 2025, 7pm
What happens when we explore photography without sight? In this experimental performance lecture, blind author and artist Dr. M. Leona Godin conjures five iconic photographs of blind subjects (1887–1997) without offering them to the physical eyes of her audience. Through narrative, image description, scent, and touch, she evokes both photographer and subject—frozen in a single instant, plucked from the vastness of a life. This is a slow seeing through sensory translation, putting Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum to the test: “I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at.”
Photography—assumed to be a purely visual medium—is a trick of chemistry and light that, at its best, transcends what is strictly seen. Walker Evans called it “the most literary of the graphic arts” for its ability to transport and transmute. Sight itself is not independent; it is interpreted in the brain, shaped by experience, bias, and affinity. Yet ocularcentrism makes vision seem inevitable, even neutral, when it is neither. Godin invites her audience to abandon the tyranny of the visual and step into another mode of perception—one that transforms and lingers.
This project began in the photography collection at the New York Public Library, where Godin discovered photos of anonymous blind people that sparked trails of association. Her exploration was supercharged by the 2023 launch of Be My AI, a ChatGPT-powered app that delivers near-instant image descriptions, helping her build mental pictures she refines through historical research, photography theory, and conversations with AI and “sighted informants,” as blind cultural critic Georgina Kleege calls them. This recursive process—translating the visual into the verbal and back again—mirrors photography itself, where chemicals develop, disclose, reverse, and fix light.
Four of these images exist in stark black and white. The fifth is spectral blue—a cyanotype, made by the lone blind photographer who steps into the frame of his own picture. Each photographic journey is punctuated with a scented, tactile token, handmade by Godin, offering the audience something to smell, touch, and take home—a snapshot fabricated not of light, but of objecthood and odor. Like a magician or hypnotist, Godin draws her audience into a shared act of perception, where belief and imagination shape what can be seen, smelled, and felt.
Blackout shades are provided. You won’t need your eyes for this.