I Lost My Sight But Found My Passion

Despite sight loss, photographer and disability rights campaigner Rachael Andrews has found an innovative way to capture the world around her...

Growing up pathologically myopic, Rachael Andrews knew nothing else apart from her thick "bottle-bottom" glasses for which she was teased. There was so much that she simply couldn't do and when she developed macular degeneration, losing all the sight in her left eye at 21, followed shortly afterwards by almost all the sight in her right, her life seemed to fall apart.

That was until she discovered she could use her limited peripheral vision, combined with the latest camera technology to create the unthinkable - beautiful photographs which would be admired by all who saw them.

"It seems quite strange, but I will never really see the images I take," says Rachael, 50. "I get an impression out of the side of my eye, but that is all. However, the first time I saw what was possible, the world seemed to come alive! When I take my photographs, everything slows down and I am overtaken by this incredible sense of calm-what I do brings me joy beyond words."

When Rachael lost the sight in her left eye, she was working as a DJ and at a ten-pin bowling alley, but she just got on with it. She then became a bingo caller and cashier a year or two later, while still DJ-ing, before she lost the vision in the centre of her right eye. This terrible event was devastating and the years that followed were a difficult time for her.

"I simply put my head down to dry my hair and when I lifted it up to look in the mirror, in that second, the middle vision had gone," she says gravely. "No one seemed to know what was happening and I went off work sick and gave up my driving licence, but my eyesight never returned, plunging me into depression.

"I have to say I spent 10 years just kind of lost," she continues. "While being trained to use a long cane, some cruel children tried to push me into the road, which sadly put me off ever trying again."