Aleksandra Kossowska – Photojournalist Based in Warsaw

“The World by Touch” is an attempt to tell the story of a world that must be imagined and understood through touch.

It is the way children growing up in the enclosed space of a boarding school for the blind learn about reality—a space that is both protective and profoundly institutional. Their everyday life is composed of sounds, brushes, smells, textures, shapes, the building of spatial memory, and the processing of sensory stimuli—but above all, of repetitive rituals that provide a sense of safety.

It is a story of childhood lived away from home—within a community, yet often in solitude—within an oppressive educational system and environment, but also a childhood marked by determination and the pursuit of independence in the world of the sighted.

The photographs were taken in 2024 at a boarding school for blind and partially sighted children in Sebeta, Ethiopia. Each image was hand-perforated so that lines and forms of light appeared on its surface—both visible and tangible to the touch. The context of this visual narrative is complemented by the reflections and lived experiences of blind individuals documented by Dr. Kamil Pietrowiak in his doctoral dissertation “The World by Touch – An Ethnographic Study of (Non)Seeing and (Dis)Ability” (published in the Monographs of the Foundation for Polish Science series). This story is an invitation for sighted viewers to touch this world—for when we touch, the experience is always mutual. As Jolanta Brach-Czaina wrote: “It is the world that touches us when we touch it.”