Touch began with a practical problem: how does a photographer make pictures of a subject who does not need light? Peter Dekens spent time with Stijn, a twenty-three-year-old man born blind who lives in a small city apartment, and the answer he arrived at shapes the entire book. During the short winter days, as twilight slid into full darkness, Dekens found it ever harder to see his way around the rooms, while Stijn moved through them undisturbed. Rather than compensate with flash, Dekens let the light fall where it fell, accepting the limits of his own vision as the condition of the work. The result is a portrait in which the photographer’s disorientation is part of the subject, not an obstacle to it.
The book, published by Eriskay Connection in 2013 and designed by Rob van Hoesel, extends that logic into its physical form. Touch is a leporello: seventy-two pages, roughly 17 by 27.5 centimetres, printed on one side with pictures joined end to end, indifferent to the way the pages fold. Read in sequence, the images describe a familiar territory — table, kitchen, bed — that guides rather than obstructs the man who lives among it. Read as an object, the book refuses the tidy containment a conventional binding would impose, so that the reader’s own passage through the sequence becomes mildly uncertain. Dekens wrote the text as well as making the photographs; Ann-Marie Cordia provided the English translation.
The apartment is small and clearly bounded, and the publication is careful to say that Stijn is not. What interests Dekens is the confidence with which a person can inhabit a limited space, and the trust required before a stranger may enter it. His approach to photography — treating reality as a starting point rather than a doctrine, working close to people in private moments — is legible here in pictures made over months of access rather than in a single decisive instant.
For collectors, Touch matters less for any claim of rarity than for the coherence of its parts: photographs, text, and a binding that all answer to the same question. It is an early example of the Eriskay Connection’s attention to the book as an instrument rather than a container, and of Dekens’s long-standing interest in lives that receive little public attention.
