🔥 Read this must-read post from Culture | The Guardian 📖
📂 **Category**: Photography,Art and design
📌 **What You’ll Learn**:
IImagine a world where judging distance is a daily struggle, and the simple act of pouring water into a cup requires intense concentration. In a school volleyball match, you see the ball and run for it, but you’re always a moment behind.
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Diplopia means double vision. It is a medical term and is defined as seeing two images of one object when you look at it. The most common cause of binocular double vision is eye muscle imbalance. Strabismus may be present all the time (constant) or occur intermittently (intermittent). Usually, if strabismus begins in early childhood, double vision does not occur. Children will usually learn to “stop” or ignore the double image when there is eye misalignment. This is called repression. In my case, even if it started very early, my vision was double and blurred, as in this photo I created (above).
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Top left: Preciola, a strabismic cat; This condition is common in certain breeds. Top right: Still Life with Glass and Depth of Field (Turin, 2023). “When I was young, my mother used to scold me all the time. I couldn’t pour the milk properly into the breakfast cup. We discovered late that I had strabismus – Chiara (Torino, 2021).
At the age of three, I developed strabismus (imbalance of movement of the eyes or strabismus). Everything had a twin, a condition known as diplopia, or double vision. About 4% of the world’s population suffers from this imbalance.
While young children often cope by hiding one picture, older children and adults face mental strain just doing the simplest tasks. It is a complex condition, often misunderstood, and rarely discussed publicly.
When I was 12 years old, I underwent successful surgery and completely regained my binocular vision. For years, I buried the memory, acting as if it never happened. However, as an adult, I started to look back. I started asking myself: Was I bad at some sports because of my personality or because of my eyes? Was I too disruptive at school because of my identity, or because of my poor vision? Did anyone else feel what I was feeling?
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Julia in her bedroom. She wears bifocal glasses to correct accommodative strabismus, and while school was difficult because of her harsh classmates, she learned to accept her glasses. “In a voice message, Julia’s mother told me that one evening, Julia looked up and asked, ‘Mom, what is that in the sky?’ She answered, ‘The moon.’” It was then that her mother realized that before she got her new glasses, her daughter had not been able to see clearly at all.
Wandering Star is an investigation into strabismus, examining the relationship between physical condition and the construction of identity, and how this visual difference affects the experience of seeing and being seen. By mixing journalistic reports on real-life situations with reconstructed memories, the work fuses my personal story with the memories and images of others.
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Top left: Vittoria in hospital after her surgery. In June 2022, her parents noticed that her eye was turning inward, a condition that was completely corrected by surgery in September 2023. Top right: The hands of surgeon Professor Nucci and his assistant during Vittoria’s operation.
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A family friend noticed that one of Vittoria’s eyes seemed to turn inward. From that moment on, an intense journey of medical visits, emergency room visits, and eye exams began, ending with the diagnosis of latent strabismus, likely manifested by fever due to mononucleosis, a viral infection. Only after the diagnosis did Vittoria’s parents begin to reconstruct some signs that seemed more obvious in hindsight: difficulties reading in school, frequently rubbing her eyes and forehead, falling, and difficulty looking into the camera when taking pictures.
Rather than searching for a firm solution, the project reflects the social and psychological implications of a different outlook. The title refers to a specific symbol from the binocular vision test, a star that remains invisible to those who lack binocular vision.
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Aida, 10 years old, suffers from accommodative strabismus, which has now been resolved thanks to the constant use of glasses. Even when you take it off, the strabismus is no longer visible. Early eye examinations led to the diagnosis of astigmatism with farsightedness (farsightedness). Prompt intervention and regular wearing of glasses helped significantly reduce the problem, which may become less significant as it grows. For Aida, glasses were never a problem: her close friends wore them too, and she never felt different. On the contrary, she places great value on uniqueness, which she sees as a positive thing.
The project aims to raise awareness about the hidden stigma and lack of understanding surrounding strabismus.
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Top: A young patient at the Oculistico Paolo Nucci studio in Milan. Professor Nucci is an ophthalmologist and surgeon specializing in pediatric eye disorders. Top left: A photographer, who can’t live without her contact lenses. She views double vision as an essential element of her identity that she fears losing through surgery: “It would be like losing part of the way I see the world, and I wouldn’t have surgery today because I’m afraid of losing this thing here.” Top right: C plays with her vision. One evening in Arles, she used her double vision to “move” the ring in her hand without touching it.
I spoke with many people, and conducted in-depth interviews with 20 of them because their stories moved me. They include a film director who turned his vision loss from amblyopia (known as “lazy eye”) into a creative powerhouse, and whose son also required an eye patch even though early intervention saved his sight; A mother described the moment her child saw the moon for the first time after he wore glasses when he was five years old. A woman who still vividly remembers her surgery in the 1980s, which involved being blindfolded and unable to see for days on end; And the paradoxical experience of following a recent surgery in the operating room, accompanying the family, and seeing how much has changed.
“Wandering Star” is a bridge between my past and my future work. It is a reflection of the act of seeing and being seen.
Wandering Star is supported by a GFX Fujifilm Global Grant
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