Out of sight

>> New York photographer John Dugdale
hasn’t let blindness get in the way of his art

“I COULD NOT SEE TO SEE”: 1999

by MATTHEW HAYS

In the ’80s, John Dugdale was becoming a name in New York’s ultra-competitive world of photography. Several of his portraits were published in Andy Warhol’s glam magazine Interview, and he was making boatloads of money doing commercial photography as well.

But by the late ’80s, Dugdale would join the burgeoning numbers of those affected direly by HIV and AIDS. He contracted the disease, and in 1993—several years before the semi-miraculous protease inhibitors were developed—would suffer a severe HIV-related illness, one that robbed him of over 80 per cent of his vision. Virtually all of Dugdale’s commercial clients promptly dumped him, and many were writing obituaries for his once promising career.

But Dugdale did an incredible thing, continuing to take photos that were inspired by the scent of a flower or the beauty of a nude body. His work evokes a powerful sense of loss, while also celebrating life and beauty. His work has been shown around the world to critical accolades. He takes pictures now, he says, largely “through intuition. I smell something or feel something, and I take a picture of it.” Dugdale doesn’t complain, at least not about the eyesight. He recently bought some t-shirts that don’t fit right: “That I complain about. But my eyesight? Some things are too big to complain about.”

On the eve of his visit to Montreal to give a talk about his work as part of Concordia’s HIV/AIDS lecture series, Dugdale spoke to the Mirror from his Greenwich Village studio.

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Mirror: What was your first reaction, when your sight faltered?

John Dugdale: Not to let my friends and family down. They were looking at me one day after a particularly bad day, when I was recovering from an HIV-related stroke, and they looked so sad. And I said, “What’s the matter?” And they said they were so proud of me and my career. And I looked at them and said, “What made you think I would stop making photographs?”

I’m going to have to re-confront that all over again, because I’m losing additional vision. So I’m thinking about the cameras that me and my assistant are going to build, that are going to have fixed focus. Each one will have a ribbon on the front of it which will be the focal length of the lens. So whenever I take a photo I can extend the ribbon and know how close or far I am in terms of focus. Fear comes, but when it does, if I can find a creative solution to it, it takes away from that fear.

M: I find it fascinating that you’ve moved back to older methods of capturing photographs.

JD: Not only are the older processes really beautiful, there’s not any of the toxicity of many of the later methods. There’s nothing very poisonous about it. That’s the physical part. The romantic part is that I hate digital cameras and I hate computers. The more advanced we got, the more it made me want to go back. I’ve always been interested in the past. I have always wanted to live in a pre-electric world, pre-Industrial Revolution. If I could step through a doorway to that time right now, I would. I like keeping the spirit of the absolute mystery of the idea of capturing light on a piece of paper alive. There’s no electronic intervention when I take a picture.

It’s a good thing

M: When word got out about your vision loss, your commercial clients bailed.

JD: They didn’t want to be around me falling over the tripod. Not when they were paying $30,000 a week to shoot a shoe catalogue. It set me free, thank God.

M: But one client stood by you.

JD: Yes, that was Martha Stewart. Every day when I was in hospital, their messenger service would drop something by. Her crew sent me a pear, a beautiful scrap of fabric, a piece of cheese, something that would keep my aesthetic imagination satisfied while I was in hospital. I was there for seven months, and they did it almost every day. It was so wonderful, because getting something from the outside—like a perfect pear—kept me sane.

M: You say that when you take nude shots, you get naked yourself. You’ve said that your time in hospital altered your attitude toward clothes…

JD: It’s so nice to be completely free about my body. I’ve always been a nudist. But clothes became so superfluous in the hospital. Do I like to see people, especially guys, with their clothes off? Of course I do. But it’s more than that. I recently had a woman who was close to 80 come to have her portrait done, and I asked her if she’d take off her clothes. She didn’t pause, she did it right away. She took off her shirt and brazier and dropped them on the floor. The publicists were chewing pencils and looked very nervous. I said, “You guys have to wait outside.” It was beautiful. She had a beautiful body.

“IN THE 42ND YEAR OF HIS AGE”: Self-portrait, 2002

Memories long and short

M: It seems there’s a strain of amnesia around the epidemic. It’s like people want to willfully forget that AIDS exists.

JD: I was just thinking about this the other day. HIV, for me, will never go away. My body feels incredible, I haven’t had a cold in 10 years, I feel like this blind foxy guy. But every time my sight finishes or I can’t see something in front of me, I’m reminded. Every waking moment is a reminder that my life is not normal, and it’s because of HIV. I never could have imagined, when I was 11 and taking pictures of my sister, that I would have to summon up the courage to go blind. Some people don’t know what to say to me, so they say, “Well, at least it’s gradual.” I wonder what it would be like for my friend, who went blind overnight. Every second that I have light, it’s like a gift from God. But on the other hand, it’s like water torture. I argue that you don’t see with your eyes, you see with your mind and your heart. There are vast numbers of images that I have inside of me, that still have to come out. I’m doing photography largely by intuition now, but I can still see shapes. It’s so overwhelming to think that I will lose what’s left of my vision. I don’t want to lose all of my vision, obviously. But I know that if I do, when I smell a daffodil, I will see it in my mind.

John Dugdale will deliver his talk, “The Tears of Apollo:
Transformations through loss; making photographs with
My Other Sight,” on Thursday, Nov. 8, at 6 p.m. in the
Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve W.) as part of
Concordia’s HIV/AIDS lecture series. A gala celebrating
the 15th anniversary of the lecture series will follow
at 8 p.m. Free admission, with donations welcome