One Week Without: Eye Glasses
2:59 PM Correcting the human eye for deficiencies in vision has been an occupation and art form since the 13th century. The earliest accounts of magnifying lenses, like most technology, can be traced to ancient Egypt, with spectacles that were capable of correcting myopia originating in Italy around 1280.
Nearsighted, farsighted, reading, magnification. There is a piece of glass or poly carbonate that will fix what ails you. With an estimated 75% of the US population using some sort of vision aid, it's a wonder that humankind was able to survive for hundreds of thousands of years without them.
I myself have had metal frames with light-bending lenses wrapped to my cranium for nearly two decades. "I wonder..." I thought, "what if I didn't have these?" I'm not the first. Lyn Venable explored the idea of shattered specs with no hope of replacement in her short story "Time Enough at Last." Best known for it's television adaptation as an episode of The Twilight Zone, it basically goes like this:
A bank teller with thick coke-bottle-type glasses loves to read. Books, newspapers, you name it. His wife and co-workers constantly get on his case about it because it gets in the way of his relationships and degrades his performance at work. One day, he takes his lunch break in the bank's vault so he can catch up on his reading undisturbed. While inside, the hydrogen bomb hits. Everyone dies, most things are destroyed, except the bank teller reading fanatic and the local library. Of course, when he exits the vault and sees that everyone he knew, including his wife has been obliterated, but the local library and the books inside are perfectly intact, the bank teller is ecstatic. He can spend the rest of his life entrenched in literary bliss. Then he trips, his glasses fall off his face and the lenses shatter. His final line: "It's not fair!"
Life's not fair.
Basically, the moral of the story: if your eyes suck and you don't have glasses, you're screwed.
Yes, I'm being facetious and sarcastic. But really, how bad can it be? Can I survive one week without corrected vision? That's the experiment. My work and art is entirely focused on the visual aspect of life. My biggest fear is that one day I'll be blind. This is my way of confronting that fear. Before I started I laid out some basic ground rules:
1st, I make my living as a photographer and videographer, if duty calls and I need 20/20 vision to ensure that a project is of the highest quality, then I will don the specs.
2nd, I don't want to put anyone in danger, so if I need to drive somewhere it's best if I am able to see the road.
Ever other time, I'm flying blind...so to speak.
I'm doing this to see how capable I am, how clumsy I can be and to see the world in a blurry new way.
Discovery, Eyewear, Glasses, One Week Without 
