When will I go blind?
March 20-29
Rubenstein Arts Center
Murthy Agora
Artist Talk, March 28, 5:30pm
If a camera can be compared to an eye, a disintegrating negative can be compared to a diseased retina. In this work, When will I go blind?, I use antiseptics, dry eye ointment, and boiling water to disintegrate images that feature the people, places, and things that bring me joy. As a photographer with Bardet-Biedl Syndrome, I am terrified and anxious about losing my vision. Without being able to see, I will be limited to my visual memories and not be able to engage with the world the way I used to. What will happen if these memories fade? Will I lose part of myself by having to engage in the world differently? I made this work while I am still sighted as a coping mechanism to process the initial stages of the disease. I hope this work connects with others who have gone through something similar, with the embossed braille offering an exclusive entry point for them. For people who have never experienced anything like this, I invite them to visualize and feel my fear of loss through this work.
Artist Biography
Hannah Schneider is an artist and photographer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is a second-year student in Duke University’s Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts program. Since discovering the darkroom in 2021 as an undergrad at Meredith, Schneider has fallen in love with the experimentality of creating work there. She is passionate about using photography to push the boundaries of the media and create narratives that reflect what is seen and unseen. As an individual facing vision loss, Schneider experiments with disintegrating images using processes that connect to and reflect the loss she fears in the future. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at Meredith College (2023), SPE’s New Realities Conference (2024), Pullen Arts Center (2024), and North Carolina Museum of Art (2025). Publishings include The Colton Review (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023) and Overlapse’s Stir the Pot. She was a finalist for Photolucida’s 2023 Critical Mass.
