Lawrence’s love of nature has deepened despite his sight loss
LAWRENCE GUNTHER BEGAN TO lose his sight as a child – he was registered blind at eight years old. “I was missing my central vision at that point,” he tells me. “But I still had all my peripheral vision, so I was doing the usual things with my three brothers and my friends – boy scouts and so on – and I loved fishing because that’s something you don’t need a lot of sight for.” In his 20s, he lost functional vision, and his blindness spread outwards through his 40s. Today, he has no light perception at all.
Lawrence – the self-proclaimed only blind conservationist in North America – is in England to talk about a groundbreaking new technology that presents photography in a way that blind people can interpret. Somewhat ironically, we meet in a central London location blessed with stunning views of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the Tate Modern Gallery and across the Thames to St Paul’s Cathedral. Lawrence welcomes me warmly and as we shake hands, he asks me to describe what I can see
