i'm interested in baudelaire's essay "the modern public and photography", in which he argues against photography as an imaginative art, an invention that was just a picture of reality that lacked the "spiritual momentum" provided by one's creativity. his main concern with the coming of photography was that people would be desensitized by false illusions of images and that mimesis would become the standard in judging art.
there is this other photographer, hugh welch diamond, that attempted to capture in photographs the essence, the physical qualities of mental illnesses carried in mentally ill people; he would have these portraits of people: depressed, schizophrenic, rabid, etc. kind of people. he wanted to use photography as a psychiatric tool to create an archive of portraits, whose subjects were the mental illnesses and not the people carrying them, in the hopes of understanding the physical trait of the illness manifest in appearance. with only my visual sense in examining these photographs, it's interesting to get a feel of these people and their minds while your other senses are blocked; to see a portrait of someone and truly understand their sheer rage, or complete and utter desolation, without any interaction. the photographs that were before me exist as a memory of the subjects' sensations, accessed solely through my eyes. i like that the photographer was so interested in this memory of mental illness, an image of the illness that is sustainable in any person with the mental illness.
i'd like to explore this idea of sense restriction, how the lack of one sense might enhance another, or how it could even perhaps perform its own duties through another sense. for example, helen keller, who, blind and deaf, transfers the necessities of those senses into touch by learning braille. does the lack of those senses actually bring out some new aspect of touch that would normally be muted out? there exists in this case a crossing of the senses, despite the lack of some senses. thus she learned to "see" by feeling what was in front of her, "hear" through touching words in braille, her hands become her eyes and ears.