The Terry Fragments

This is a project about the portrayal of blind people through my documentary practice. It uses strategies that aim to reduce social stereotypes in media representations of disability, especially by focussing on everyday routines and rituals from the characters’ perspectives. The project comprises two feature documentaries, The Terry Fragments and June’s Patchwork. The Terry Fragments features Terry Hopwood-Jackson is a blind painter, who also writes short stories and poems, and who loves solving crosswords with his partner Pam. www.theterryfragments.com June’s Patchwork portrays June Bretherton, a blind writer of short stories and novels, and an aficionado of the local history of her home town Harwich. www.junespatchwork.com Both films aim to represent Terry and June from their own perspective, rather than imposing universal, emotion-laden plots onto their lives. The purpose is to reduce conventional disability stereotypes by depicting the characters as complex and multi-layered screen personas, rather than schematic characters that function through their blindness. As the narrative does not capitalise on or centralise the disability, their visual impairment is neither foregrounded, nor pushed into the background. It is merely one, amongst many others, embodied feature of their quotidian lives