Robert West Brian Powers
But the results are as real as wood and fire. As real as Shafer’s disability.
If Shafer, 29, were standing next to you as you stepped back to take in the fullness of Meet Me at the Mountaintop, he couldn’t see the entirety of his work. Not like a fully sighted person could. When Shafer was a teenager, his right eye started to develop a blind spot and tended to become cross-eyed and twitch when he would try to read. It got bad enough that he had to place a hand over his right eye to read at all. “Things went downhill pretty quick,” he says. At 17, he was diagnosed with Stargardt disease, a genetic eye disorder that causes the eye’s macula to degenerate, making the center of his field of vision “fuzzy” or “static,” he says. Both of his sisters have the disease as well. His most recent eye examination showed his vision to be 20/300. There is currently no cure for the disease, and treatments are few. It’s rare for those who have Stargardt disease to go completely blind, and Shafer’s condition seems to have leveled off, he says. Still, moving though life can sometimes be challenging for him. 22 | ENCORE MARCH 2020
Eric J. Schaeffer
Losing sight
He reads words by recognizing their shapes and fills in the middle letters by recognizing the first and last few letters. His cell phone is something like a second eye, a sort of digital magnifying glass that he uses to zoom in on all sorts of things most people take for granted. Saved on his phone’s photos folder are images of menu pages and receipts, screenshots of text messages. Text-to-voice apps also come in handy. Shafer will look you in the eye, but he won’t see your entire face. Without you really even
Top: Despite his limited vision, Aaron Shafer taught himself to be a photographer. Below: The symbolism behind Meet Me at the Mountaintop made this work a healing labor for Shafer.
noticing, he will move his eyes around, ever so slightly, so he’s looking just off-center of your face. It’s then he can see you. “I have to fake it all the time,” he acknowledges. “I look people in the eye, but I am not really doing that.” Still, his strategies cannot always be employed. Sometimes he walks past people he knows on the sidewalk or misgenders a
