The World by Touch
Aleksandra Kossowska, Poland
Aleksandra Kossowska is a Polish documentary photographer and photojournalist based in Warsaw, focusing on displacement, disability, migration, and marginalized communities across Central and Eastern Europe. With a background in archaeology and journalism from the University of Warsaw, she earned her B.A. with distinction from the ITF Opava and is currently pursuing her Master’s degree there. Her work has received international recognition, including The Alexia Portrait Mentor Grant, and she co-founded Poleczki.art, a photography center in Warsaw dedicated to contemporary photography.
The World by Touch is an attempt to tell the story of a world that must first be imagined before it can be known — a world discovered through touch.
This is how children growing up in the enclosed space of a boarding school for the blind learn to navigate their surroundings — a space that is at once protective and deeply institutional.
Their everyday lives are built from sounds, textures, scents, gestures, and shapes; from constructing spatial memory and processing sensory cues from their environment — and, above all, from repetitive rituals that create a sense of safety.
This is a story of childhood lived away from home, within a community, yet often in solitude; childhood shaped by an educational system at once caring and oppressive, but also by determination — the quiet insistence on gaining independence in a world designed for those who see.
The photographs were made in 2024 at a boarding school for blind and partially sighted children in Sebeta, Ethiopia. Later, they were manually perforated, transforming their surfaces with delicate lines and constellations of light — visible and tangible to the touch.
The project is complemented by reflections and lived experiences of blind and partially sighted individuals recorded by Dr. Kamil Pietrowiak in his doctoral research, The World by Touch – An Ethnographic Study of (Non)Seeing and (Dis)ability (published within the Monographs of the Foundation for Polish Science).
This work is an invitation to those who see — to reach out and touch a world often inaccessible to them. For when we touch, the experience is always mutual. As Jolanta Brach-Czaina wrote:
“The world touches us when we touch it.”