Photographer hopes for international exposure

Melbourne photographer Andrew Follows has ambitious plans for 2012.

The Eltham resident hopes to raise enough money to fly to Scotland later this year so he can attend his first international exhibition which will be shown at the Edinburgh Arts Festival.

What is most remarkable about Follows’ career is that he is legally blind.

Born with retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that damages the retina, Follows has no vision in his left eye and has tunnel vision and cataracts in his right. He takes photos by picking out shapes and movement, then enlarges the file on a computer screen to detect the detail.

“Photography’s always been with me,” Follows told the Star Observer. “It was 2008 when I first got my digital camera … then I started to see a lot more things in my work that I really hadn’t picked up before.”

For the arts festival exhibition, Follows will collaborate with vision-impaired Scottish photographer Rosita McKenzie. The artists will show images depicting the desolation of bushfires (Follows was involved with the relief effort following the Black Saturday bushfires) and regeneration on opposite sides of the world.

“I kept photographing and seeing what was happening, because my eyes couldn’t see what was happening, but through the camera I could,” he said.

So far Follows has raised around $15,000 thanks to a grant from the Ian Otter Foundation and sales from his Melbourne Images By Night calendars.

He will take his guide dog Eamon with him, but still needs to raise more money and hopes to sell more calendars to do so.

Follows said he has known he is gay for many years. Single, he said he still holds hope there is someone special out there for him.

“I haven’t really been out on the scene for about 10 years,” he said. “Having the dog too, you can’t do that.

“I’d dearly love to have someone in my life. I reckon it’d be awesome to let them share it and come on this journey.

“But I don’t wallow in it, I just get on with it. And if people want to be part of my life, that’s awesome.”

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