UNSEEN, listening to visually impaired South Africans

189pp, paperback, Modjaji Books, Cape Town, 2025

ISBN: 9781991240279

Joanne Bloch explores what it means to be visually impaired, drawing on her own experience of sight loss, as well as conversations with twenty other partially sighted and non-sighted South Africans. 

“Unseen is a valuable and timely contribution to the understanding of visual impairment in South Africa. But it is also so much more. In her moving personal account of sight loss, combined with interviews with a range of partially sighted and non-sighted South Africans, Joanne Bloch presents a devastating indictment of the systemic barriers to access and accomplishment that confront people living with disabilities in our society.” Kobus Moolman, poet and Professor of Creative Writing, University of the Western Cape

“Unseen offers an expansive and poignant perspective on blindness and coming to terms with the loss of vision. The book sensitively explores what it means to live with blindness across varying domains of life, and for people with different historical backgrounds in South Africa, and kinds of and degrees of visual impairment. This complex treatment shows readers the multiplicity of living with visual impairment and in so doing, breaks down stereotypes of disability that are often reductive. It is a valuable addition to making visible the lives of people with visual impairment who often go unseen.” Kharnita Mohamed, author of Called to Song

For most of her adult life, Joanne Bloch was an exhibiting visual artist. She also worked as a freelance writer, specialising in human rights-related and educational materials. In 2011, six months into her PhD in Fine Art, Joanne was faced with irreversible sight loss. After she completed her PhD, her deteriorating vision forced her to abandon art-making and concentrate entirely on writing. She lives in Cape Town.