Blind photographer: Rosita Mckenzie
Frame a photograph through description.
Rosita McKenzie is a photographer who has never seen one of her own photographs.
She lost her sight at eleven, following an eye infection. Years before she picked up a camera, she was already working closely with visual art. From the early 1980s, Rosita worked with galleries and museums across the UK on access for blind and visually impaired visitors, looking at how exhibitions were described, how people moved through them, and how artworks could be understood without relying on sight alone.
She did this for more than twenty years before photography became part of her own practice.
In 2006, Inverleith House at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh invited her to create Two Voices, her first photographic exhibition. Rosita went on to work across portraiture, documentary photography and more abstract images shaped by colour and light. In 2009, she began Edinburgh People, an ongoing portrait series of people she met around the city. Her work later travelled internationally as part of Sight Unseen, and she founded the Revealed Photographic Group for other visually impaired photographers.
For Listen Closer, we spent a day with Rosita in Portobello. We followed her from a conversation at home, through the sounds at the arcade and out towards the beach.