Italy, 2020
The past few months have been difficult for all of us, and so are those we are going through and those to come. Yet it is important to remember that there are more fragile sections of the population, for which more care is needed. These include people with visual disabilities, which the WHO has placed in the categories most at risk of contagion and which, as it is easy to understand, have been exposed to greater criticality during quarantine and will be so in later stages, for the measures of containment.
The blind and the visually impaired have in fact enormous difficulties to maintain the safety distance, very often they need companions or assistance services, and the obligation of social distance does not favor them; for them it is more complex to work in smart working, They are bewildered by changes in public transport and, above all, rely very much on touch, which in this period is a sense almost banned.
My work is inextricably linked to sight, and this is probably the motivation that prompted me to investigate what is lockdown means for the blind or visually impaired and what now entails a gradual return to normality, in compliance with government restrictions.
The people I photographed are 13 to 90 years old and suffer from different degrees of visual disability.
