"Instead of running away from fear or terror, I'm the type of person that goes straight into it," filmmaker Rodney Evans told WNYC's cultural critic Rebecca Carroll, about his decision to make "Vision Portraits," a new documentary that profiles four artists who are visually impaired, including Evans. Perhaps best known for his 2004 breakout film, Brother to Brother, Evans was diagnosed in the late 1990's with a rare degenerative eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, which results in the gradual deterioration of vision. Along with Evans, "Vision Portraits" features photographer John Dugdale, dancer Kayla Hamilton and writer Ryan Knighton, and while Evans said he hopes the film will offer something for a fully-sighted audience, he said it's more about representation for the visually impaired.
"Part of the DNA of the film is to give a fully-sighted person the experience of what a partially-sighted person might be experiencing in a subjective way," Evans said. "For the low vision and blind community there's such minimal representation, that just to contribute to the canon of representation is so huge."
Evans, who today has only 20 percent of his vision left, which means he can only see what's literally right in front of him, said his gradual loss of vision has allowed him to get better performances from his actors, because he's unburdened by peripheral distractions on a film set. "I'm not seeing the 5K light that's being put up over the actor's head. I'm not seeing the boom pole. I'm not seeing all of the technical apparatus that goes around filmmaking," said Evans. "I'm seeing the actors. I'm seeing what's going on in their face. I'm keeping the entire world of the film in my head."
"Vision Portraits" provides a deep, rigorous dive into the work and art made by Evans and his three other subjects, and also challenges stereotypes about what it means to be blind -- among the more compelling, that all blind people see is darkness. "I think people experience blindness in multiple ways. For me, it's like when a picture is overexposed and there's a blinding white glare," he said. "It's almost like the light is just reflecting from everything, and I need to, you know, to put it in nerdy cinematic terms, to close down the aperture a little bit."
His documentary opens on August 9 at Metrograph in New York.