In 1994, a stroke left the young photographer John Dugdale nearly blind, and over the years since, he has lost the remainder of his vision. But has never stopped taking photographs.

“I have a few wonderful people in my life that I trust to help me create the pictures that I see in my mind,” Dugdale tells guest host Alan Cumming. He insists on releasing the shutter on every photo he takes. “It’s the most sacred time in my life whenever that shutter opens and closes — and it’s also the only time I’m quiet.”

Dugdale came to New York to study at the School of Visual Arts, graduating in 1984. While he was in school, some friends invited him to a farm in upstate New York to help out with a book about flowers. “I was much too snobby to think of doing color [film] work at that time,” Dugdale admits, but the trip changed the course of his career. With very little professional equipment to speak of, Dugdale improvised. Using a clip-on lamp with a pair of pantyhose over the bare bulb, he gave his photos a “rosy orangeish hue” that made them look like “little illuminations from a Bible.”

See some of Dugdale's photography below.

That aesthetic caught everyone’s attention, and Dugdale quickly became an in-demand commercial photographer, shooting for Bergdorf Goodman, Martha Stewart, and The New York Times. “I knew that I wasn’t doing what I had meant to do,” he tells Alan, “but when people are offering you that enormous amount of money when you’re 25, it’s kind of hard to say no.”

Dugdale contracted HIV in the mid-1980s. In the early 1990s he became ill with cytomegalovirus retinitis, an eye infection common in HIV patients, and it accelerated quickly. “I didn’t tell anyone, because I thought through magical thinking maybe it would go away,” Dugdale explains. “In a matter of weeks I lost one eye.” A stroke left him paralyzed for a year and left him with about 20% of his vision. “I had pretty much everything that killed most of my friends at the time and they died right in the room around me,” he tells Alan. “I’m alive because my mother brought me elbow macaroni with Parmesan cheese and beans every single day for a year.”

When Dugdale was released from the hospital, he almost immediately began working again. He tells Alan that the photographs “poured like a libation out of a vase. I barely even felt like I was making them. They just made themselves.”

Dugdale started using a Deardorff camera from 1905 and dropped his signature orange-rose look for the bluish cyanotype images he has been making for the last two decades. Having endured treatments with toxic AIDS drugs, he chose cyanotype because it involved the least toxic chemicals of any photo process he could find.

A series of Dugdale’s recent photos is inspired by the writings of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Dickinson’s poetry, in particular, helped him use his imagination to compensate for his lack of sight. “Emily Dickinson flew over her house and observed her life from above before there were airplanes,” he marvels. “I totally identified with that when I was paralyzed. It was very easy to leave my body.” While listening to Dickinson's or Whitman’s works read aloud, Dugdale jots down phrases that inspire ideas for photographs that “instantly appear as a picture full blown in my mind.”

“Being blind is not what you think,” Dugdale tells Alan, “it’s not all darkness. My optic nerve still works and shoots a beautiful ball of brightly colored orange and purple and violet light and sparkling flashes all the time. My mother always used to say, ‘John, I would give you my eyes if I could,’ and I always told her that I didn’t really want them because this experience has been so magnificent. I feel like the Cheshire cat.”

"Flowers Rediscovered" 1985

This photograph incorporates Dugdale's signature technique, stretching pantyhose over a light bulb.

(John Dugdale/Stewart, Tabori & Chang)

"Untitled, Self-Portrait with Teacups" 1994

(Courtesy of John Dugdale)

"Spotted Floral Bouquet" 1994

(Courtesy of John Dugdale)