Evgen Bavcar: self-portraits and the "images-stain"

Abstract

In this article, the reading of four self-portraits made by Evgen Bavcar, a blind photographer and philosopher, is presented with the purpose of trying to figure out how he creates the character, or persona, of a ‘blind photographer’. Published in his book Memória do Brasil (Memory from Brazil), the first of these self-portraits is analyzed leading me to put forward the hypothesis that Bavcar presents a kind of manifest in his book. I also suggest that we could think about these photographs as “images-stain”, meaning that, when we look at them in the hopes of finding images made by a blind man, they give us back the image of our own prevailing blindness since, by being situated on the liminal of visibility, they question and dispute our own assumptions about blindness.