Cultura
My point of view
Blind since the age of 11, Slovenian photographer Evgen Bavcar sees the world through his camera
di Staff
Written by Sarah Hejazi
Imagine to take a picture in the dark. It’s a matter of capturing something that cannot be seen, but felt, touched and experienced with all the other senses. Taking a picture in the dark is like taking a picture of a sound, of a scent or of a memory and this is what Evgen Bavcar does. Bavcar, 65 years old, is a Slovenian philosopher and photographer, who’s been blind since he stepped on an anti personnel mine when he was eleven. He can see but he sees in the dark, because his eyes are in his mind. Sometimes he creates the picture he wants starting from a precise idea he has in his mind, using someone else’s eyes. Other times he personally takes the pictures, with the help of the sound, the physicality or other different perceptions of the subjects he wants to capture in his photos. He has become the first blind professor in Slovenia , and his interior images have been exhibited all over the world, but Bavcar feels to belong to a generation which has never seen the end of war. As a matter of fact the workshop he has recently led at his photography exhibition in Turin was about the relationship between body and war. “War and body are indissolubly related: the story of a war is written on people’s bodies. One of the photos in the exhibition tells the story of a friend of mine. He his blind too, but he also lost his arms in the war. Without his hands he had to find another way to read Braille. So he started using his upper lip. He basically kisses the letters, by kissing them he’s able to read.” Bavcar said.
His first time
Bavcar’s photography is not a form of provocation but a philosophy that reconsiders the visible world in order to give the blinds an access to images. “Sighted people think they must explain the world to the visually impaired, but I want to establish an active relationship between the blind and the sighted and make people understand that even the blinds can teach something, that they can represent and explain the world. This is not a form of artistic exoticism but a process of democratization of the difference”. For this reason in his conferences, Bavcar can explain the meaning of an horizon, a shadow or a light reflection to people who were born blind: “These are things you do when you try to mediate between two worlds: the visible and the invisible worlds. It’s always the same world but there are so many ghettos in it. I explain these things in order to overcome ghettoization”. People keep asking him why he takes pictures if he cannot see them. “Perplexity comes from the relationship people have with blindness: fear, castration complex, even evocation of their own private Oedipus complex…it’s as if the blind somehow represented Oedipus after the tragedy”.
Bavcar took his first picture when he was 16 years old. It portrayed two girls. According to his friends they were beautiful. “I fell in love by proxy,” Laughs Bavcar “All my friends were in love with those two girls, so I trusted them! There’s a Russian saying that says: it’s better to believe your eyes, even though they are crossed, than trusting other people’s perfect eyes. This is the reason why I took a picture of them. I wanted to be able to give an opinion. This is how I started to create my own images. Seeing is the sum of all the dreams and nightmares but we forget the nightmares when we can see things from a different perspective.”
