How can a blind man become a photographer? Evgen Bavcar tells Róisín Ingle why he treats his camera as 'a third eye'.
The first thing you notice about Evgen Bavcar is how very much he resembles a character from a Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph. The black hat is suitably flamboyant, the red scarf draped artfully around his neck. Even before he opens his mouth, Bavcar is making a statement. I may be blind, his outfit seems to say, but that does not prevent me from making a lasting impression on the visual world. What's more, Bavcar is a blind photographer. Around him on the walls of the Alliance Française hang examples of his beautifully rendered photographs, light-infused black-and-white creations featuring nude women, buildings, swallows and, here and there, himself. How does a blind person take a photograph? It doesn't seem an unreasonable question.
Although the 60-year-old Slovenian, who lives in Paris, has probably answered it a million times, he answers in perfect French, apologising for his lack of English. "It's a funny thing, I agree, but the important part is that I dare to do it," he says through his interpreter, looking straight at you through his clear spectacles. He favours them over dark glasses, he says, as rather than accentuate his condition they lend him an intellectual air.
"I have an image in my head, and I glance at it through my third eye. Each photo I create must be perfectly ordered in my head before I shoot," he says. "I hold the camera to my mouth in order to photograph those I speak to. Autofocus helps, but I can manage on my own. I use my hands to measure the distance, and the rest is achieved by the desire for images that is always inside me."
To demonstrate exactly what he means, he takes his Leica out of an elegantly battered leather bag, onto which is strapped his collapsible white cane. He reaches out to touch my head, asks me to speak, then clicks his camera. A few seconds later he points it at me from another angle and asks somebody to confirm that I am framed properly through the lens. Then he clicks again.
"I do get help from other people who I trust know the image that I want to achieve," he says, adding enigmatically that "the trust is good, the control even better". He works mainly in the dark, using portable lights to create the images that form in great detail in his head. His stunning representations of the Eiffel Tower, for example, feature toy-size images of the landmark dancing around in the photographs.
When and how did he go blind? He asks whether you want the biological, historical or aesthetic answer, then tells you the biological and historical answer: he lost the sight in his left eye when, as a young child, a branch hit it; he lost the sight in his right eye when a mine detonated. By 12 he was almost totally blind. He has described how the loss of his sight went on for months, like a long farewell to light. "So all the time I had to quickly capture the most beautiful things, images of books, colours and celestial phenomena and to take them with me on a voyage of no return."
The aesthetic answer, he says, is that "losing sight is like a breaking of a most mysterious mirror. Everybody gets the mirror as a gift. Some have it always and some only for a while. This wonderful mirror has broken, and photography is a way of putting the pieces together".
He began taking photographs at 16, when he borrowed his sister's camera to take shots of a girl he was in love with. It was a way of capturing something forever that he could not himself see. He continued photography while studying history in Slovenia and philosophy in Paris, at the Sorbonne. His photographs have been exhibited all over the world, and he lectures at schools of photography.
We talk about the female nudes in his collection. Does he need to touch them in order to "see" them? "It's a perverse question," he says, answering it anyway with a smile. "The women may perceive that I touch them, but I don't touch. I look, in the way when I touched your head I was looking." He says the women sometimes find it disconcerting when he is taking their photograph; they get concerned about whether they look pretty. He, of course, cannot tell them, so he wears a small circular mirror on his lapel, to reassure them of how their image appears to the seeing eye.
"Blind people also see and watch, but it is in a different way," he says. "Every blind person has a right to take photographs. Of course, I don't see the images as directly as you do, but I see them in my spirit. It's a non-direct aesthetic. It is my artistic expression. I try to show things in a different light." ...
Images from Here and There, by Evgen Bavcar, is at the Alliance Française, Dublin, until May 16th. You can view more of his photographs at http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/bavcar