Imagine that you are a young, successful commercial photographer at the height of your career, living and working in one of the most visual and vibrant cities in the world. You become ill, suffer a debilitating stroke, and survive a life-threatening illness. With help from family, friends, and the medical community, you slowly recover, but lose your eyesight and the career that depend on it. What will you do?
This is John Dugdale’s story, and he chose to move forward.
Dugdale, now 60 years old, has been blind for nearly half his life from complications related to HIV. After a lengthy rehabilitation period following his illness, his next-door neighbor and close friend, Judy Seigel, an influential practitioner of 19th-century photographic printing processes, showed him how to make cyanotypes. Initially, the lure of cyanotype was its relative ease and non-toxic nature. The color blue, as natural as the sea and sky, symbolizes peace and tranquility. Fittingly, Dugdale views his own life as “a beautiful and unexpected journey.”
Judy Seigel’s generous welcome-home offering of this process was a gift that, like Judy herself, has had a profound and lasting impact on Dugdale’s life. Although Dugdale works in several photographic processes, he is best known for his quiet narratives rendered in rich tones of deep Prussian blue.
When Dugdale lost his sight, he never once entertained the thought that his photographic career had ended. He felt then, as he does now, that his loss of sight never truly impacted his ability to see. Dugdale asks of himself, “How can I be blind, when I’m able to see so many images in my mind?” He creates his images through an ever-evolving and deeply personal prism of visual narratives, clearly seen within his mind’s eye. Photographed and contact-printed in serene tones of blue, they are about the essence of his life. Never literal, but always autobiographical.
The Artist’s Mother, 1999
Dugdale has never embraced the ease that 21st century technology affords the contemporary photographer. He prefers to work with his large format 11x14 Deardorff camera, appreciating the deliberate, thoughtful slowness of the process and the quality that film itself possesses—how light interacts with silver halide crystals—a look that is impossible to duplicate in a digital transparency. He also appreciates the exacting limitations a large format camera imposes. For Dugdale, that self-imposed limit is eight sheets of film for one photograph. Often, he knows he has his picture in the very first take. But sometimes, he says, as he edges closer to that last sheet of film—just when he has nearly given up—the image will appear for him. His favorite photograph that he has made, he says without hesitation, is one of him and his mother, made while he was still in recovery. On his last sheet of film, and aware that he had not yet made the photograph he wanted, his mother instinctively reached for him and pulled him close, cradling his head in her arm. Unplanned, this simple gesture is a loving, generous, and intimate connection between mother and son. That singular quiet moment preserved on film and rendered in blue, reveals a personal narrative all its own—no words needed.
Dugdale’s photographs offer a kind of quietude that seem palpable. An inherently spiritual man himself, that quality is often deeply felt by the viewer. He finds that, after having viewed and connected with his work, visitors will sometimes speak to him at his openings in a whisper, as if they are in a holy place.
That Dugdale can create such personal images, culled from an infinite visual library—seen only in his mind—and imbue them with a spirituality that so profoundly resonates with his viewers—seems no small feat. Never sinking into nostalgia or sentimentality, Dugdale innately understands the need for photographs to be communicative. At the same time that he offers a deeply personal look into the essence of his own life, he simultaneously offers wholly interpretive narratives into our own.
Self Portrait with Keats Death Mask, 1999
Perhaps this universality is achieved, in part, in the way he photographs. Dugdale frequently enlists the help of his subjects. He sets up his Deardorff and arranges a tableau. If he is photographing someone else, he offers his subject a tutorial on how to focus on the ground glass. Dugdale, the photographer, poses as the subject, essentially “becoming the mirror” of what he wants to photograph.
Now when he is photographing, he can simply touch someone’s face to know how the sunlight might be falling on them. He can trace the branches and leaves of the hydrangeas that grow on his beloved property in upstate New York, and feel how the seasons alter them. The touch of antique linen, the tracery of growing vines, the smell of fresh flowers, or the feel of those same flowers bending towards decay, all serve to continually bolster his visual library.
Dugdale’s growing inspiration not only originates from a lifetime of those collected images; he is also greatly influenced by the words in Henry David Thoreau’s journals; in Emily Dickinson’s poems; in The Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal church; and by the photographs of Henry Fox Talbot and Julia Margaret Cameron.
In the end, John Dugdale’s images are all his own—a collective thing of beauty—a gift for our hearts and souls. This from a man who may have lost his eyesight, but never his vision.
This article first appeared in Issue 16, The Blue Issue.
