World Braille Day takes place on 4 January and with that in mind we have chosen Gary Waite as our Inspirational Diversity Champion of the month.

Gary is a photographer who only took up taking photos after he lost his sight.  He found out he had a hereditary eye condition, retinitis pigmentosa, at the age of 19. It was a total shock to him as it is women in a family who are carriers and the men get it. Two of his brothers and one nephew have the condition.

To begin with, he tried his best not to be associated with the condition. He didn’t want to be seen that way and throughout the Eighties he was hiding. He was able to play football with his mates, but would then bump into people on nights out. He tried a lot of jobs; including an electrician and a plumber; but it was too dangerous.

Eventually, he became depressed and his eyesight was getting worse when, in the early Nineties, he went to Moorfields Hospital and met an amazing woman named Barbara Norton, in the social work department, who helped him to get in touch with support groups.

Then, aged around 40, Gary’s eyesight went completely and it was while attending an IT course for visually impaired and blind people in Camberwell that he heard about the charity PhotoVoice.  Gary wasn’t interested at first and then, his curiosity overcame him. From the moment he lifted a digital SLR camera and started to experiment and ask questions, he was hooked. And he became really good at it.

It helped that Gary had not been blind from birth and knew what colours were but he needs to use his other senses particularly sound and touch and he uses his cane to be able to work out how to take the photo.

He always have someone with him and they go through the photos and have them described and together they edit the ones to delete or keep.

To find out more about PhotoVoice see here https://photovoice.org/our-partners/

To find out more about World Braille Day see here

https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/world/world-braille-day