⬅ Access Lab & Library

Image description resources

PREPARED BY FAYEN d’EVIE & JON TJHIA
for Newcastle Art Gallery, February 2025

About

These references, readings and exercises gesture toward histories of image description in the west, and contemporary experiments with it, as well as access-driven aesthetic possibilities yet to be articulated or realised.

In them, we hope you find permission and invitation, nuance and encouragement to put language to expansive purpose – as we have!

Approaching description

Ekphrasis

Recent developments in ekphrasis might be traced back to 1759 and Denis Diderot’s reviews of works in the Paris Salon. Diderot became acquainted with Melanie de Salignac, a blind girl, and their conversations laid the foundations of art criticism grounded in image description – as informed by conversations between blind and sighted friends.

Some exposition of this can be found in Georgina Kleege’s chapter, ‘The Subject at Hand: Blind Imaging, Images of Blindness’ in social research (Vol. 78, No. 4, The Image – WINTER 2011, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

Further:

'What am I tuning out, and what might others see that I’m missing?’ Read ‘From the front lines: The magic of ekphrasis’ by Yi Shun Lai (The Writer, 2024).
Murray Krieger’s Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (2019) is available in full as a downloadable ebook.
Explore two adjacent translations by Sarah Stutt of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ekphrastic poem, ‘Apollo’s Archaic Torso’ (Carol Rumens, The Guardian, 2010).

Image description: It’s not immediately clear what the scale of this image is, so it could be a satellite image of a high-altitude landscape – with clutches of green trees and shrubbed ridges cutting across an uneven, snow-sprinkled range – or it could be mouldy food. As your eye moves from left to right, the crispness of its many crooked, spotty details drop off into slack focus. At some point you lean or zoom in, enlarging the image to examine it more closely, and in time resolve that it’s a dark brown rock with a coating of lichen and moss. Around the middle, there are small pinkish patches and a couple of red or orange notes. Dozens of ants cross its micro-terrain, visible by their white, rice-shaped cargo.
Photo: Jon Tjhia

Strategies of description

Alt T ext as P oetry is a highly influential project led by Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan. Download their workbook, or find out more (conversationally) with ‘Bojana Coklyat in Conversation with Shannon Finnegan’, by Amy Berkowitz in The Believer 138 (2021).
How do traditional descriptive practices leave their intended audiences cold – and why should we attempt new approaches? Georgina Kleege makes a convincing argument in ‘Fiction Podcasts Model Description by Design’, published in Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, ed. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez (NYU Press, 2023).
‘Blundering into Sensorial Conversation’ by Fayen d’Evie, in The Museum Accessibility Spectrum: Re-imagining Access and Inclusion, eds. Alison F. Eardley and Vanessa E. Jones (Routledge, 2025). (You can download the full book too, and we recommend it!)
‘Though the descriptive track narrates the removal of her garments, and the various positions she takes in bed, there is no description of her naked body … In reviews of the film and interviews with Hunt, much is made of the nude scenes. Hunt was praised for her courage in baring her forty-nine-year-old body … This points to what seems to me a somewhat misguided attempt on the part of the descriptive service to leave something to the blind viewer’s imagination that is explicit to the sighted viewer. This modesty felt unduly paternalistic to me, as if I needed protection from this central element of the film’s content.‘

How significant are the omissions of traditional audio description? Georgina Kleege shares her frustrations with common assumptions of blind audiences in ‘Audio Description Described: Current Standards, Future Innovations, Larger Implications’ (in representations 135, University of California Press, 2016).

‘Celmins speaks of her method of transposing photographic imagery as “redescribing” rather than copying or reproducing.‘ In ‘Redescribing the Periphery’ (SFMOMA, 2019), Fayen d’Evie examines an intersection of blindness and conservation in Vija Celmin’s exhibition, To Fix the Image in Memory.
In two short clips, Rebecca Bracewell reflects on incomplete sensory experiences, and perspective and multiplicity in descriptive practice (2023).

Description in practise

Jack Bernard writes on problems with self-description in ‘Bringing a closing to disclosing the clothing’ (Braille Monitor, 2022).
Imagism, a complicated poetic movement of the early 20th Century, presents a range of potentially informative provocations or invitations to the field of image description; see ‘Preface to Some Imagist Poets’ by Amy Lowell (1915).
Through the project NO-PHOTO 2024, an anonymous collective of artists and designers deploys poetic – and sometimes graphic – image descriptions to highlight the absence and censorship of photographs, as Cherine Fahd writes in ‘Guerrilla festival no-photo2024 is highlighting the unseen work of Palestinian photographers in Gaza’, published in The Conversation (March 15, 2024).

Image description: Luke D. King is kneeling on grey tarkett, his ginger curls illuminated. He wears a flowing, silver-grey top with loose bat-wing sleeves, and white pants. He is turned towards the right, looking with concentration at his hands, which are clasping one wrist of Benjamin Hancock, who is in drag as Miranda. Miranda is lying on the floor, looking upwards, but not at Luke. A pair of high heeled shoes sit neatly to one side of them; to the other side, metres away in the background, Rebecca Bracewell sits calmly upright. A red sheet of transparent plastic pours down to the floor from above, liquefying the sight of what’s behind and in front of it.
Photo: Gianna Rizzo

Access Lab & Library is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.