CHICAGO — On a rain-soaked afternoon in March, Michael Wojcik is walking around Chicago’s Loop, searching for the perfect snapshot.
“I love a rainy-day photo with traffic. It’s actually a good thing,” Wojcik said.
Walking past alleys, down sidewalks, and in traffic, the photographer is trying to find something beautiful hidden in plain sight.
“Even the ordinary, the mundane things are really quite beautiful. And all you need to do is just look and pay attention,” he said.
At North Michigan Ave. and East Ohio Street, he found the perfect spot to stop.
“I think I got that one,” he said, as he clicked his camera, catching a passing pink umbrella that stood out on the dull gray day.
“Wish we got a little more lighting,” he said. “But it is what it is. Like any person who may have an iPhone or a smartphone, I find something that’s interesting to me, steady my hand and take the photo.”
But the Loop resident isn’t just like any average photographer.
“I am legally blind,” he said.
A blind photographer may sound like a contradiction. Why would a person whose life is shaped by what he can’t see spend so much energy and effort creating visual images?
“For me,” Wojcik said, “it’s kind of a healing mechanism, you know?”
The 53-year-old has low vision, an uncorrectable impairment that dims and distorts what he sees, and congenital nystagmus, a condition that creates involuntary and uncontrolled eye movements.
“Reading street signs – all sorts of things that others take for granted, is something that’s kind of a challenge for me,” he said.
But you would never know by looking at his pictures, which can be viewed on his Instagram page.
“You need to compensate for what you’re lacking,” he said. “So, knowing that I can’t see as well as others, I’m more patient.”
Once he captures his images, he re-touches them to enhance the colors and shades.
“I spend my evenings – this is my way of staying out of trouble – is to stay home at night and edit photos on my couch,” he said.
He uses a magnifying glass, like a detective looking for clues.
“What photography does, whether it’s mine or anyone else’s, is it makes you draw in close,” he said. “It makes you look.”
His photos reveal a side of the city he would have never been able to see without his camera: the lakefront in winter, the sunrise in summer but he never loses sight of those whose lives reflect his in some way.
“I am disabled and people of all types come out and live and experience the city,” he said.
One of his photos shows a sunbathing amputee, another captures a wheelchair participant in the Chicago Marathon. In seeing his photos, you see beyond his disability.
“You can do anything,” he said. “Whatever you seek to do, there’s a means to do it.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
