The Realm of the Senses

For blind travelers, the world reveals itself in ways that go far beyond the visual.

- Andrew Leland

IN 2018, EDITH LEMAY and Sébastien Pelletier learned that three of their four children were losing their vision because of retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a progressive, incurable retinal disease. (I have RP as well; I was diagnosed a bit later than the Lemay-Pelletier kids, when I was a teenager, and today, in middle age, I've got a fraction of the vision I used to.) "The hardest part with the diagnosis was the inaction," Lemay says near the beginning of Blink, a new documentary about the family. Lemay met with a "specialist" who told her that, in the absence of a cure, the best thing for her to do was to build up her children's storehouse of mental images. The specialist suggested that the family page through an illustrated encyclopedia together, "to look at the pictures of elephants and giraffes," Lemay recalled, "so when they do go blind, at least they have an image of what it looks like."

But why look at pictures of giraffes, Lemay thought, when the real thing is more indelible? The family, who live in Montreal, had always wanted to travel the world, and now they had an urgent motivator. "Let's go all in and fill their visual memory with as many beautiful things as we can," she said.

Blink follows the family's journey to 15 countries, hopscotching across a grid of Instagram-bright images: trekking at dawn in the Himalayas; camel rides in Egypt; whitewater rafting in the Amazon River Basin. National Geographic produced the film, and the family's trip is perfectly in line with that brand's hunger for vivid, glossy, full-color panoramas.