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I ask, "What are we looking at here?"
Inevitably there is a pause, and then the description begins: "It's a black-and-white photograph of a man. A full-face portrait. He's a youngish man, maybe around thirty..."
"How can you tell?"
"His face looks ... fully formed. A younger face would look softer around the chin and ... there's not much in the way of wrinkles. His hairline seems to be receding slightly, or maybe he just has a naturally high forehead. Or else it's the way his hair is combed straight back. There's not a lot of hair, or else it's a light color, probably light brown or dark blond."
"What else? Give me a gut reaction."
"He looks very intelligent."
"Why?"
"He's wearing glasses, smallish, roundish, metal frames."
"Glasses make people look intelligent?"
"It's not just that. His gaze is very direct. He is gazing directly at the camera."
"You can see that through his glasses? There's no distortion?"
"No. His eyes are clearly visible. And it looks as if he's looking directly at me."
"And this makes him look intelligent? Maybe the photographer just told him to aim his eyes that way."
At some moment in this interrogation my informant could become exasperated and say what Louie Armstrong reportedly said when asked to define jazz: "If you gotta ask you'll never know." And it's true, because I am legally blind. I am not totally blind; I can distinguish light from darkness, and identify most colors when they are highly saturated and presented one at a time. I lack the visual acuity to distinguish such details as features on a face, pattern on fabric, or print on a page. Forms appear amorphous, without stable contours. On top of my vague and inaccurate perception there is a good deal of distortion, pulsating or swirling patterns of colored dots, and occasional flashes or sweeps of color that have nothing to do with what's before my eyes. So while my visual perception can be entertaining, even aesthetically pleasing at times, it is notoriously unreliable. Since childhood when my blindness was first diagnosed, I have known that my eyes will usually deceive me, so I need to come by knowledge by other means, either through other sensory information or...