Artworks – Ways of Not Seeing

Available for over a year

For decades, art galleries have provided blind visitors with audio descriptions of paintings in their collections. But these descriptions are often only dry, “objective” accounts of the fabulous artworks they aim to represent. Now, a new world of imaginative audio description is emerging, and it promises to transform the experience of art galleries for blind and sighted people alike.

Our guide to these new approaches is blind writer Joseph Rizzo Naudi, who takes us on a search for a highly unusual oil painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter, Frans Hals. Join him as this elusive painting is brought to life by a unique group of blind and not-so-blind describers, and experience for yourself a fascinating approach to visual art that depends not so much on what we see, but what we say.

Featuring Georgina Kleege, Professor Emeritus of English, University of California, Berkeley; Hannah Thompson, Professor of French and Critical Disability Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London; Maria Oshodi, writer, theatre director and CEO of Extant; Bart Cornelis, Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings 1600-1800, The National Gallery; artist and writer Elina Cerla; anthropologist of access Harshadha Balasubramanian; and Katy Tarbard, Gallery Educator, The National Gallery..

Writer and presenter: Joseph Rizzo Naudi
Producer: Michael Umney
Executive Producer: Susan Marling
Mixing Engineer: Chris O’Shaugnessy

Original poem written and read by Ella Frears
Standard gallery audio description read by Megan McKie-Smith

John Berger’s essay “The Hals Mystery” appeared in The Threepenny Review (no. 10, Summer 1982)

Joseph Rizzo Naudi is a postgraduate researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, where his research is funded by the Techne AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership.

With special thanks to Margherita di Ceglie, Anne Fay, Karen Elsea and Alexandra Moskalenko at the National Gallery for their support.

Programme image shows a detail from Frans Hals, Portrait of a Woman with a Fan, about 1640 © The National Gallery, London.

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