These images aren’t corrupt and your screen isn’t broken. For the purpose of this documentary I decided to research what the world may have looked like for some of the colour-blind children who spent their time here throughout the decades and how it would have affected the way they viewed their environment differently to the rest of us, including me as I explored the school in its derelict state 14 years after its doors closed for good.
Two in every 1000 children in the UK suffer from vision impairment. Some of these children may have other types of difficulties with their vision that – particularly when combined with other disabilities or special educational needs – can have implications for the child’s learning and development. For example, eye movement problems, or problems with the way that the brain interprets visual information. The children who spent most of their juvenile lives here could not function in a classroom at a run-of-the-mill public school, so required constant support in order to continue to learn and develop throughout their early years.
Founded in 1923, Sunshine House Nursey School specifically catered to the daily needs of up to 24 children who suffered with vision impairment of all kinds for just under 8 decades, when in 2002 the RNIB (The Royal National Institute for the Blind) announced that it was costly and under-used, and that the specialist education for the remaining 12 visually-impaired and handicapped children aged four to 11 would be supplied at other special needs schools in the region.
The school itself had been under threat numerous times over the years. In its earliest days of operation it cared for much younger children, as it was then known as ‘Sunshine Home for Blind Babies’. Sunshine House was extensively rebuilt following WWII after a nine day long bombing raid ended on April 26th 1941 that almost destroyed the care home, killing three young nurses. One of the first eyewitnesses on the scene was recorded in the local newspaper the following day saying: “I’ll never forget the sight of all the little children in their cots waving their arms and crying. They had been able to hear the terrible noise but did not know what had happened because they couldn’t see it. There was rubble all over the place. The home was completely ruined, but the wing where the smallest babies were had hardly been touched.”
As well as children suffering from total blindness, many were subjected to severe cases of colour-blindness, the developed world’s most common genetic condition. It affects one in 12 males and one in 200 females, this means that about 450,000 children in the UK - that’s one child in every classroom- can’t identify many different colours, not just reds and greens. As children progress through school, the ability to differentiate between colours becomes even more important. Without correct support they are often unable to understand information in textbooks, on the whiteboard, or in day to day instances that effect their lives in so many ways such as social interaction and identifying foods and objects around them.
People with dichromatic colour vision cannot perceive a specific section of the light spectrum, either red, green or blue. This can mean that children are born into a world of murky greens where blues and yellows stand out, or browns, oranges, shades of red and green are easily confused. Both types will confuse some blues with some purples and both types will struggle to identify pale shades of most colours. A confusing world where reds become greens, and blues become lilac, whilst pinks become grey. In some severe cases of monochromacy, the entire world is perceived as black and white. The following images have been altered in order to sympathise with these disorders and give a unique outlook on a world that some children see throughout their lives on a daily basis.
