Designing Possible Futures for the Business Realm via Business Anthropology
«I will see less and less all the time, even though I may not lose my eyesight I shall become more and more blind because I shall have no one to see me» — Blindness, By José Saramago.
I learned to observe with explorer's eyes. I have always been interested in discovering the world through the senses. I even remember pursuing piglets at my father's farm. They were very fast, that is why I could never touch their skin, however, that did not stop me from trying, I always tried. I also used to plan excursions to climb fantastic mountains and discover imaginary worlds. When I grew up, I understood that those games responded to my desire to tell stories through my memories. Those stories had a guiding principle: an image. Without knowing it, I was trying to associate the sensations with certain mental images that allowed me to express an emotion, an opinion, or an idea. Perhaps that is the reason why I became a photographer. Today I understand that je ne sais quoi of the visual necessity and its importance. There are several opinions about what an image is. Some people limit images solely to the visual universe, that is, everything we see. For example, the perception model of Western society is dominated by the sense of sight. There are multiple stories where ideas referring to knowledge, light, education, reality, and/or truth are linked directly to sight. But, what if sight did not dominate our perceptive process, would we be able to shape images? Would we be educated? Would we still tell visual stories? These questions allowed me to get involved in a whole new world. If we asked a photographer what is his worst fear, he would probably respond: going blind. I decided to take that fear to enter the world of blindness. Just like a curious boy, I took ethnographic resources to travel a world where, instead of being the one-eyed king, I was just another blind man.
I discovered that, despite the absence of sight, our body still perceives sensorial stimuli, constructing another type of sight developed in the intersection between memory, emotions, and identity. In order to arrive to this conclusion, I tried to place myself in the world of a blind person. I began walking down the street without my glasses, and then with my eyes completely closed. It tried to ride my bicycle a few meters doing the same dynamic, but almost instantly I had to open my eyes, not to hit another cyclist. I even tried to choose the clothes that I would wear, and also getting dressed in the darkness. The first time I met a blind photographer was in 2014. I lived in Maracaibo, my hometown and had the pleasure to interview Sonia Soberats, a recognized blind photographer worldwide. When I became familiar with her history, her perception of the world really resonated with me. She is also from Venezuela, which helped us connect, and share ideas around the world that surrounded us. The article was published in the newspaper where I worked. Right after that, my search for the visual scape changed. Every photographer, including myself, used to take Henry Cartier Bresson as a reference. Accepting, as an axiom, his idea that taking a photograph involves a physical and intellectual satisfaction generated when using our mind, eyes, and heart to capture a fragment of reality. Thus, my first reference was guided by the idea that photography is a means to show the truth by reconstructing an image with sight. According to this, human beings' socio-cultural context becomes evident through sight. This feature of the photographic image provides it with an incalculable value as docuThe required image | 17