Canon and RSBC Photography Beyond Sight

Photography Beyond Sight: When a Photograph Becomes Something We Can Touch

Explore Canon and RSBC's tactile photography project and how accessible technology expands photography beyond sight into touch, identity and experience.

Canon, the Royal Society for Blind Children and the Expanding Experience of Photography

Photography is usually understood as a visual medium. We make photographs with light, compose them through a viewfinder or screen, and ultimately experience them through sight.

But what happens when a photograph can also be felt?

A recent initiative by Canon UK & Ireland and the Royal Society for Blind Children (RSBC) offers a compelling answer. Through a combination of photographic education, tactile printing technology and inclusive creative practice, the project has enabled visually impaired students to experience their own photography through touch as well as storytelling. Canon announced the initiative on 19 August 2026.

For photography educators, this is more than an interesting application of printing technology. It invites us to reconsider a fundamental question:

What actually makes a photograph meaningful?

From photographic expression to tactile experience

The project began in late 2025, when Canon Ambassador Elisa Iannacone delivered a bespoke Canon Young People Programme workshop for seven RSBC students in Orpington.

The students created portraits centred around their favourite activities. Photography therefore became more than an exercise in camera operation: it became a creative means of expressing identity and personality.

That starting point is important.

The students were not simply being taught how to make photographs. They were using photography to say something about themselves.

The subsequent stage of the project transformed those photographs into something fundamentally different from an ordinary photographic print.

Watch the video to learn more about how Canon and the Royal Society for Blind Children:
Inclusive Photography: Canon Young People Programme at RSBC

When the photograph acquires physical dimension

Canon used its elevated printing technology to transform the students' portraits into tactile relief prints.

The photographs were printed using a Canon Arizona 2380 XT with PRISMAelevate XL software. Carefully developed height maps and multiple layers of UV-curable ink were used to build raised textures into the images. The resulting photographs possess physical dimensions that can be explored by hand.

This is a fascinating development because the underlying photographic image has not disappeared.

Instead, it has acquired another layer of information.

A conventional photograph presents differences through colour, tone, brightness, contrast, shape and perspective. A tactile relief can introduce another perceptual dimension: surface, height, contour and texture.

The photograph therefore becomes not merely something to look at, but something with which the viewer can physically interact.

The image becomes an object.

Photography as embodied perception

This has implications beyond accessibility.

Photography is often discussed as though the camera captures an objective visual record and the viewer subsequently looks at that record. Yet photography has always involved more than the eye.

We move through environments. We anticipate moments. We remember places. We recognise people. We associate images with sounds, textures, emotions and personal experiences.

The tactile photograph makes this ordinarily hidden dimension of photographic experience explicit.

It reminds us that perception is embodied.

For a visually impaired student, the relief image offers an alternative route into a photographic representation. The photograph is no longer dependent upon sight alone for its physical experience.

This does not mean that touch somehow replaces vision. Rather, it demonstrates that the meaning of a photograph can exceed the sensory channel through which it was originally produced.

That is perhaps the most interesting philosophical aspect of the Canon–RSBC project.

From image-making to storytelling

Canon's Young People Programme provides another important dimension.

The programme supports young people in using visual storytelling to explore the issues, ideas and experiences that matter to them. In the RSBC project, this principle becomes particularly significant because the students' photographs originated in their own interests and identities.

The camera consequently becomes a means of agency.

The student is not merely the recipient of photographic technology. The student becomes the author of a representation.

The tactile transformation then returns that representation to the student in another form.

There is something powerful in that cycle:

experience → expression → photograph → tactile object → renewed experience

The resulting object is not simply a reproduction. It is a physical reminder of an act of self-expression.

Accessibility changes the question

Inclusive photography is sometimes approached primarily in terms of removing barriers: making cameras easier to operate, providing accessible facilities, or adapting educational environments.

Those things matter.

But the Canon–RSBC project suggests a more ambitious approach.

Instead of asking only:

“How can photography be made accessible?”

we can also ask:

“How can the photographic experience itself be expanded?”

That is a different question.

The project does not merely attempt to give visually impaired students access to conventional photographic outputs. It changes the output so that the photographs can be encountered differently.

That distinction is significant for photographic education.

An inclusive photographic practice does not necessarily require everyone to experience photography in exactly the same way. It can instead recognise that people encounter images, environments and creative experiences through different combinations of perception, memory, language and bodily awareness.

The photograph as a multisensory object

There is also a useful lesson here for photographers generally.

We often concentrate on the technical attributes of an image: sharpness, exposure, dynamic range, colour, composition, autofocus performance and resolution.

These are important photographic variables.

But they are not the whole photograph.

A photograph also carries meaning.

It can represent a person, preserve a memory, communicate an experience, document an environment or express an aspect of identity. Its significance may therefore exist independently of the technical sophistication with which it was created.

The tactile relief process makes this particularly visible.

A photograph that can be physically explored demonstrates that an image can have another life beyond the screen and beyond the conventional photographic print.

It becomes something that occupies space.

It becomes something that can be encountered.

A permanent photographic legacy

The project does not end with the exhibition.

Canon and RSBC state that the tactile relief prints will remain on permanent display at RSBC, giving the students an ongoing opportunity to revisit their work and continue engaging with photography in an accessible and inclusive way.

This introduces another important concept: photographic memory.

The students' photographs are no longer only files stored somewhere in a digital system. They have become physical artefacts connected to an educational experience and to personal identity.

The photographs can therefore be revisited not only as images, but as objects carrying the memory of having created them.

A small personal connection

There is also a personal reason why this particular initiative resonates with me.

As a primary-school entrepreneur, the first profit I ever made was sent to the School of the Blind in Worcester, Western Cape.

That is a very small footnote compared with the scale and technology of the Canon–RSBC project. But decades later, seeing photography being used to broaden creative participation for visually impaired young people creates a meaningful sense of continuity.

Today, through Vernon Chalmers Photography, my contribution is primarily educational: sharing photographic knowledge, encouraging development and supporting continuous learning.

That makes this Canon initiative particularly worth acknowledging.

Photography belongs to everyone

Canon describes the RSBC collaboration as part of its broader commitment to inclusive creative education. RSBC, meanwhile, describes the response from students and their families as overwhelmingly positive and expresses the hope that the project will lead to more accessible exhibitions and learning experiences.

That aspiration deserves attention.

Photography is an extraordinarily adaptable medium. It can be scientific, documentary, artistic, commercial, personal, educational or deeply introspective.

And perhaps it should not be defined too narrowly by the assumption that its experience begins and ends with sight.

The Canon and RSBC project demonstrates one possibility: a photograph can become tactile without ceasing to be photographic.

It can retain its story while acquiring another sensory dimension.

For photography educators, that is a valuable reminder that the most important photographic question is not always “How good is the image?”

Sometimes it is:

“What does this image allow another human being to experience?”

That is where photography moves beyond equipment and technique.

It becomes communication.

It becomes education.

It becomes participation.

And, ultimately, it becomes another way of connecting human experience.

Reference

Canon UK & Ireland. (2026, August 19). Canon and the Royal Society for Blind Children enable visually impaired students to experience photography through touch. Canon UK & Ireland.