We read images just like we read sentences. Every detail—a line of teeth gleaming across a smile, a pissed-off bird glowering on a fencepost—shapes the meaning of what surrounds it. Every color is an adjective, every angle a verb, every nostril a punctuation mark. The Alt Text Selfies assembled in this book forcefully articulate this point: the practice of writing alt text, which began as a way of making images accessible to blind or low vision people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to them, is at its heart a process of translation. This essay is an attempt to understand the mechanics that underlie this process of carrying the visual into the realm of the verbal. What is the grammar of photography, and how does it change when a photo becomes alt text? How does alt text’s status as an accessibility practice change the politics of photography’s troubled relationship with disability and the othering gaze? To answer these questions, I want to start not with photography, or disability, but with poetry. One imperative of the alt-text form is to reduce a picture’s thousand words’-worth down to a lean few hundred. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on each word. And no one has more experience putting pressure on short pieces of language than poets.
In 1871, the sixteen-year-old French poet Arthur Rimbaud described his efforts to become an artist in a letter to his teacher. “It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses,” Rimbaud explained. “It’s wrong to say I think: one should say I am thought….I is someone else.” This last, famously ungrammatical line—in French, je est un autre—captures the alienation that any artist must feel (at least according to Rimbaud), rattling the coherence of a stable identity to turn oneself strange, into another. “Tough luck to the wood that becomes a violin,” Rimbaud added.
The acts of self-portraiture (selfie-portraiture?) collected in this book make Rimbaud’s artistically ungrammatical idea literal. In the self-portrait, the I is always othered: the first person metamorphoses into the third, though perhaps not entirely—elements of both perspectives remain. One thinks oneself, becoming both thinker and thought; the selfie’s subject is both seer and seen. Estrangement, ideally, leads to illumination.
After his teenage poetic exploits in France, Rimbaud traveled to Ethiopia and Yemen, where he exported coffee and later brokered an arms deal with King Menelik II. (Rimbaud’s time in Africa—he was part of the first wave of Europeans to visit Ethiopia, and “the first known European to take photographs of Harar” (O’Dell 447)—was marked by both overt racism and a deep engagement with the region’s languages, cultures, and politics.) In letters home, Rimbaud managed to include some travel selfies: “These photographs are of me, the one standing on the terrace of the house,” he wrote, providing a kind of alt-text or image description for his sister, despite the fact that she had the photos right there:
The other standing in the café garden, another with arms crossed in a banana garden. All of these are a little washed out because of the dirty water I’m forced to use to clean them with. The next ones will be better. They’re only sent as a reminder of my face, and to give you some idea of the landscape here.
But all self-portraits are developed with Rimbaud’s “dirty water”—if the gaze of the other distorts the image, one’s self-regard can be just as muddying. I recently completed a memoir about my experience of becoming blind, which felt like an extended, book-length exercise of inhabiting this self-estranging idea of I is someone else; I was at once the storyteller and the story, and I couldn’t always be sure I trusted myself to present my life fairly—who let this guy in here with his camera, and what the hell is he looking at?
This experience, of turning the wood of my everyday life into a book-shaped violin, felt oddly encapsulated at the end of the writing process, when I decided to include an image description, or alt text, alongside my author photo. This photo was taken by my friend, the photographer Gregory Halpern, on my porch. As I attempted to describe the image (I have enough residual vision to see it, with some ambivalence), I found myself adding adjectives that a more neutral describer wouldn’t dare deploy, calling myself a “faintly chubby, not-bad-looking middle-aged white man.” When I asked some alt-text connoisseurs (in fact, the editors of this volume) what they thought, they made a simple suggestion that ended up feeling radical: “Could it be written in the first person?” they asked.
Wait, I thought, are you allowed to write alt text in the first person? Of course there are no official rules for this emerging artform, but somehow the style of the caption—usually written in an impersonal third-person voice of authority, the same one that intones the copyright page and dust-jacket copy—had taken over my authorial alt-text. But it was jarring for these readers to hear these personal descriptions—my faint chubbiness—in that voice. By writing the alt text in the first person, I wrested some of the third person away from Greg’s image of me. I had injected some selfie into his portrait.
This is one of the remarkable things about alt text as a form, and the gift of the Alt Text Selfies project: the reminder it offers of the describer’s ability to be a person, and not just a caption-copywriting, ersatz authority. The self-describers in this book offer a range of details that any other viewer of these photographs would never know. If Yemi hadn’t written their description, for instance, we’d never know that the black chunky headphones sitting on top of their “short hot pink curls” are blasting drum and bass. It’s only in Emilie Gossiaux’s self-description that we learn that “the air smells like wet dirt.” A range of modalities beyond the visible arise: a rich efflorescence of sounds, smells, and feelings.
In some cases, it’s only through description that we learn that an image is a selfie at all. In Kyla Jamieson’s self-portraits, only one has a human form; the rest might be described as a series of melancholy objects caught in an indifferent landscape. We see an “uncherished” loyalty card lying on the ground; a jar of pickles at a closed beachside resort; a metallic pinwheel spinning in the wind. These objects (in Jameison’s description, they hardly feel inanimate) become images of the self. In “We Are Real,” the poet and songwriter David Berman of the band Silver Jews sings:
My ski vest has buttons like convenience-store mirrors and they help me see
That everything
In this room right now
Is a part of me
This is the same gesture Jameison makes by seeing a pickle jar as a self-portrait in a convex mirror: through the distortions of our self-regard—the reflections in our convenience-store-mirrored eyes—the world is a part of us as much as we are a part of it.
This is a unifying, transcendent kind of seeing. But the gaze is just as capable of alienation. In her book Staring: How We Look, the disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, “We may gaze at what we desire, but we stare at what astonishes us.” Garland-Thomson anatomizes all the various ways that visibly disabled people experience the (usually unwelcome and non-consensual) stares of strangers. We become subjects of astonishment, revulsion, curiosity, and appraisal. And one of the best ways to study this sort of looking is when it becomes exposed on film, seen through the lens of a camera.
In 1916, the American photographer Paul Strand built a machine that would help him engage in this sort of looking without being caught. He attached a decoy lens to his camera, and hid his real, functioning lens off to the side, perpendicular to the false one, within an “extended bellows.” This allowed him to appear to shoot in one direction, while his camera (and its viewfinder) actually caught his unwitting subject. (Had he intentionally built a Rimbaudian artmaking machine, one that operated in a paradoxical second and third person simultaneously, pointing in two directions at once?)
Strand brought his contraption to New York City’s Lower East Side, which at the time was teeming with street peddlers and recent immigrants from across Europe. The most iconic image he produced from this body of work, Blind Woman, New York (1916), depicts a woman standing against a wall. She wears a sign with the hand-painted word BLIND around her neck, just below a city-issued medallion authorizing her to panhandle there. Her head tilts toward the right of the frame. Her right eyelid is closed tight, likely the result of an enucleated eyeball, or another effect of disease. But her left eye is strikingly large and vivid, and despite the boldface BLIND label that she wears, it appears to gaze off at some unseen object with intensity.
This image, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (where it is collected), immediately became an “icon of the new American photography.” The same year he took this photograph, Strand produced Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, which the Met places among “the first significant abstractions intentionally made with a camera.” Inspired by the formalism of contemporary painting, Strand appears to treat the blind woman as he does the bowls of fruit in his Connecticut cottage: as a figure to be composed and abstracted into a modernist image of fragmented form. In other words, Strand’s gaze seems not nearly as invested in the social humanism of its documentary subject as it is in the formal intrigue expressed by her mismatched eyes, which appear, like his trick camera, at once blind and seeing. These divergent eyes are visually ungrammatical, another photographic analogue of Rimbaud’s “I is someone else” (or, sorry, “eye is an other”). According to the critic Sanford Schwartz, Strand’s photos are “cityscapes that have faces for subjects,” an idea that inverts Kyla Jamieson’s approach to her selfies, which find her face in the city’s pinwheels and pickle-jars. In Blind Woman, New York, it’s the nondisabled photographer who uses the disabled person’s image as a metaphor for the city, or the camera, or wherever else his imagination leads him.
Was Strand drawn to this image because of the way it seems to mock or mirror his own project? The woman’s sidelong glance appears to be looking at something, but her blindness suggests that this eye, too, is a decoy. There are many blind people who appear to see, whose eyes dart and fix, but in their experience, they see nothing. And likewise, there are blind people with eyes that passersby read as blanks, but that still gather visual information. Strand’s image is the antithesis of a selfie: an extractive, literally duplicitous portrait, reifying the familiar, estranging message that looking at disability usually engenders. If the Rimbaudian artist says that I is another, here the photographer’s gaze says something more damaging (and much less interesting): You are someone else.
But what happens when the disabled gaze turns back on itself? Having read the alt-text selfies in this book, I long to read the 1916 blind woman’s description of herself. Would it sound as abject and abstract as Strand’s photo seems to insist it is? Or would it sound more like the alt-text selfie of the blind writer M. Leona Godin, who in her portrait wears a “mischievous smile” and “luscious Violet Ambrosia perfume”? Godin’s experience, as she enjoys a gin and tonic at a picnic table, and that of the anonymous blind woman begging on the street are obviously radically divergent. But Strand’s image omits any possibility that the blind woman’s life might contain joy, or any complexity beyond a mask of suffering and an emblematic, metaphorical gesture of deceptive looking.
While he was in Harar, Rimbaud developed a tumor on his knee that eventually forced him to return to France, where his leg was amputated. His arms later became paralyzed, and he died soon afterward. In this final chapter of his life, Rimbaud looked at himself as a disabled person with totalizing self-pity: “All I do is cry, day and night; I am a dead man; I am crippled for life,” he wrote in a letter. “Death would have been preferable to much of what I’ve been going through. What is a crippled man to do in the world?”
If Rimbaud’s self-portraits from Africa intentionally included backdrops that gave its viewer “some idea of the landscape here,” once he lost his leg, disability crowded everything else from the frame. “Beside me I see nothing but these cursed crutches: I cannot take a step, cannot exist, without these sticks,” he wrote. “When I am walking I cannot look at anything but my solitary foot and the ends of the crutches.” As Emily Jane O’Dell observes in an illuminating article about this understudied time in Rimbaud’s life, this experience pushed the poet out of the first, and into the second person. “Your head and shoulders slope forward, and you slump along like a hunchback,” he wrote to his youngest sister, Isabelle.
You tremble at the sight of objects and people moving around you, frightened they’re going to knock you over and break the other leg. People sneer at the way you hop along. When you sit back down you have lifeless hands, and armpits rubbed raw, and the face of an idiot. Despair overwhelms you once more.
In his experience of disability, Rimbaud’s self-estrangement—his I becoming, like the wooden leg he disdained, another—arises not from any artistic derangement of the senses, but a bodily one. He sees himself, perhaps, in the same way that Paul Strand, and the rest of the passersby on the street, saw the blind woman. In another letter, he described himself as an “immobile lump.”
Rimbaud is, of course, entitled to his despair; one can only speculate that, if he’d survived to live with his disability longer, he could have found some peace with it, or even something approaching the casual joyfulness that Godin finds in her blind selfie. The disabled selfie need not—indeed must not—be free from images of pain; the crucial point is only that the disabled subject herself be the one to describe and name it. Jodie Kirschner’s alt text selfie here elegantly expresses the difficulty of regarding oneself in a world that stares at disabled people with pity, revulsion, and intrigue. It’s this pain, she writes, that makes her image indelible, and beautiful, in the first place.
“I’m a mirror freak,” Kirschner writes,
heartbroken, far beyond the trembling task of looking at myself, and because of that you won’t ever forget me or my wind-blown hair drenched in oils.
Thanks to Jordan Bass, Lily Gurton-Wachter, and Alex Kitnick.
Citations
- Department of Photographs. “Paul Strand (1890–1976).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pstd/hd_pstd.html (October 2004).
- Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look, Oxford University Press, 2009.
- O’Dell, Emily Jane. “Geographies of Disability in the Letters of Rimbaud: Mapping Colonialism and Disablement in Yemen and Ethiopia.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Volume 13, Issue 4, 2019, pp. 445-460.
- Rimbaud, Arthur. I promise to be good: The letters of Arthur Rimbaud. Edited and translated by Wyatt Mason. Modern Library, 2007.
- Silver Jews, “We Are Real,” American Water. Drag City Records, 1998.