NATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGES-Future Exhibitions

Interweaving the visual and non-visual, Obscured Portraits: Seen and Unseen addresses essential questions regarding watching versus being watched, and seeing versus not seeing. Using the lens of photography history, it explores how images shape our understanding of existence and non-existence. Navigating distinct perceptual layers and social contexts, the exhibition unfolds across two primary themes: “Boundaries of the Gaze” and “Perceptions Beyond Sight.” Through this framework, it investigates the power dynamics of blind portraiture, the potential of non-visual photography, and cultural representations of disability and class.

“Boundaries of the Gaze” focuses on the blind and how the visually impaired perceive the world through their senses. In the “Who Cannot See?” section, international works spanning from the 19th century to the present are anchored by classic portraits from the J. Paul Getty Museum collection. Photos of street beggars and musicians trace the historical trajectory of the blind being viewed as “social others” during the nascent stages of visual culture. These images compel us to ask: Were blind subjects aware of being photographed? How are their bodies represented within the frame? Viewers reflect on a fundamental question: For whom does the image ultimately exist?

Beyond classic portraiture, the “Beyond Vision” section showcases works by visually impaired photographers from Slovenia, Mexico, Japan, and Taiwan, as well as video installations by a Korean artist reinterpreting the photography of a Japanese visually impaired creator. These artists replace traditional visual composition with faint light, sound, texture, memory, and writing. They challenge the hegemony of the visual, developing unique creative methodologies such as inscribing Braille onto photographic paper. Using auditory or somatic experiences as a basis for their compositions, they generate images through non-visual perception. By redefining “seeing” through bodily experiences and social observations, they reexamine and reconstruct the language of imagery itself.

“Perceptions Beyond Sight,” meanwhile, shifts focus from the blind as subjects of the gaze to overlooked social perceptions. This theme emphasizes commentary and cultural politics inherent in the relationship between disability and class. It features works by sighted photographers and contemporary artists that address themes of blindness, impairment, tactility, and social stratification. The “Tactile Signal” section transcends the visual to explore perceptual boundaries between body and sense, image and matter, and the visible and invisible. Another section, “Disabled Society,” expands the sub-theme of “Who Cannot See?” to further reinterpret blind portraiture. Anchored on works by Taiwanese photographers from the collection of the National Center of Photography and Images (NCPI), it places the intersectionality of gender, disability, and social class within a local context, revealing how marginalized groups are represented, labeled, or objectified within the ecosystem of imagery.

Further, the section “Obscura Operation” is arranged as a pitch-black, darkroom-like experiential space. It features photography by five young visually impaired Taiwanese artists and collections from NCPI, accompanied by tactile information and audio descriptions. The audience touches and listens in the dark, discovering how the senses converge to “read” images. Ultimately, this exhibition explores both aesthetics and photography’s role as a medium for social intervention. As a documentary tool, photography historically shaped the collective image of the disabled, supporting both exclusion and observation. Contemporary photographic practice, however, is self-aware of power dynamics and equality. It seeks to dismantle visual hegemony, respond to the politics of disability, and expand perceptual boundaries.

Boundaries of the Gaze

Under the title “Boundaries of the Gaze,” this floor examines images and voices of the blind and the visually impaired. It traces the tradition of blind portrait photography since the 19th century, investigating how this distinct group has been captured, classified, and represented through the lens of sighted photographers. In the historical archives, the blind and the visually impaired are often relegated to the position of passive objects. They become targets of charity, pity, or medical discipline; their appearances reduced to social metaphors. Besides historical retrospective, this floor also presents inversions of visual power. For example, the “Beyond Vision” section features works by international and local visually impaired photographers. By redefining photography through touch, sound, and mental images, they demonstrate how image capture is not merely an extension of the retina, but rather a multiplicity of perceptual paths. Here, viewing is no longer a unidirectional act, but a dialogue and negotiation across sensory boundaries. Finally, in the pitch-black space of the “Obscura Operation” section, visitors undergo a sensory reset. Through tactile graphs and audio descriptions, they experience a de-visualized, truly inclusive possibility of viewing.

Exhibition Themes

Who Cannot See
Who Cannot See
Following its invention in the 19th century, photography rapidly became a tool for constructing social classifications and identities. In the “Who Cannot See?” section of “Boundaries of the Gaze,” the curator uses the J. Paul Getty Museum’s historical collection to examine how Western visual culture produced stereotypical images of the blind and the visually impaired. In these early archives, the blind or the visually impaired rarely were afforded independent agency as portrait subjects. Instead, they were marked as having specific social roles: itinerant musician, street beggar, or pauper awaiting relief. Using visual symbols such as sunglasses, canes, sighted guides, and identity placards hung on the chest, photographers reduced blindness to a recognizable set of physiological and class characteristics. Modernist photography pioneers like Paul Strand even employed false-lenses, turning subjects into prey who did not know they were being photographed. This narrow-minded gaze led to the binary logic of the “charity model” and “medical model” prevalent at the time, which reduced the blind and the visually impaired to “others” in need of pity or “abnormal beings” requiring identification. Through these images, viewers are asked to reflect: When blind subjects lack power to return a camera lens’s gaze, do we see their reality, or the fears and projections of the sighted?
Beyond Vision
Beyond Vision
If photography is not only about seeing, what else can it be? This section challenges the preconception that photography must rely on eyesight by gathering works from visually impaired photographers and artists from Slovenia, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Slovenian photographer Evgen Bavčar proposes the concept of the “Third Eye,” touching the world through mental images and the interplay of light and shadow. Mexican photographer Gerardo Nigenda punctures braille directly onto photographic paper, transforming images into tactile objects. Japanese professor Hirose Kojiro grounds his work in tactile culture to record non-visual spatial perceptions. These creators are no longer passive subjects, but active operators. Korean artist Jung Yeon-Doo edited thousands of photographs taken by a blind masseur, Shiratori Kenji, into a video, exploring how the visually impaired use the camera as a sensory prosthesis. Jung found they are able to capture details that the sighted overlook due to an over-reliance on vision. Here, photography becomes a philosophical act beyond the visual, inviting viewers to re-measure the depth of the world through the eyes of the blind.
Obscura Operation
Obscura Operation
Camera obscura is the prototype of a camera: a dark chamber where light is captured. Here in this section, the concept is transformed into a site where perception is reset. A pitch-black space void of visual input features works by five young visually impaired photographers alongside classic pieces from the collection of the NCPI. In this space, the visual dominance of sighted viewers is rendered invalid. Instead, exploration must rely on tactile perception, haptic pictorial information, and auditory guidance with audio description. Using the latest UV printing technology, photographic works are translated into textured physical forms. Combined with AI-assisted audio descriptions, the act of “reading” an image becomes a collaboration between hearing and touch. This is not only a display of accessibility technology, but the realization of a universal museum. Only when light vanishes do humans truly begin to learn how to see with the full spectrum of their senses.