The man with the blind stick

During my education as a supervisor in healthcare, I was given the following assignment: 'Write a story for one of your clients. It must match the reading level of the target group. The implementation is free. You can choose a picture book, a story read aloud or, for example, a poem. The person for whom you are writing the story must benefit from it'. 

I knew almost immediately what I wanted to do with it. The workplace where I gained my experience is a day care center for people with mild intellectual disabilities. In addition to their disability, clients often also suffer from autism and/or physical discomfort. One of my clients is a young man. He has an intellectual disability with autism and is also very visually impaired and often walks with a blind stick. This client is talented: he takes beautiful photos and started doing so when he was eleven years old, just like me. I hadn't seen any new photos for a few weeks, when he made a suicidal post on Facebook, I went to talk to him. 

He stopped taking photographs because everything was pointless anyway. I then told him that I only recently found out why I still enjoy taking photographs at my age. That's because you basically photograph the beautiful things in life. And that every time you photograph a beautiful flower, a bird or even a drop of water, you actually capture the beauty and attractiveness of life. And that you always encounter the positive sides of life. What I wanted to make for this client was a picture book. A book with a story about someone who, after years, finds meaning in life again through photography. That book became 'The Man with the White Blind Stick'.

Old postcards were used for this project. These are equipped with photographed 'train figures', scale 1:20.