Man in Arctic Mask

In the 1992 techno-thriller Sneakers starring Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier, the viewer is treated to a quick shot of a braille issue of Playboy magazine, a possession of the film’s sole blind character, “Whistler,” played by David Strathairn. The shot is played for laughs, but braille editions of Playboy are a real thing; on eBay they are rather pricey, fetching prices of $30, $40, $50 and beyond—one optimistic seller is asking $400 for a single copy of the April 1992 edition.

It’s not known whether Lisa J. Murphy was inspired by the braille Playboy, but she came up with quite a different solution to the question of providing blind people with sexual gratification via printed matter. A resident of Canada, Murphy has produced a book called Tactile Mind: A Book of Nude Photographs for the Blind/Vision Impaired, which is “a handmade thermoform book consisting of 17, 3-D tactile photographs on white thermoform plastic pages with the visual image and descriptive Braille accompaniment.”

After publishing the main book, she followed it up with a smaller set of images she calls Tactile Atelier Bookmark. Referring to her picture of a woman’s posterior with panties on, which you can see below, Murphy said, “The butt was really hard to sculpt. I wanted to get it nice and even and give it a feminine softness so it would actually feel like a woman’s butt. It took me days to sculpt all the curves right, but I’m told it does feel like a woman’s butt in a G-string.”

Incidentally, Murphy does not use the word pornography to describe her work. We’re a blog, what can I say?

Each book costs $255 Canadian (about $180 U.S.) and can be ordered directly from Murphy’s website.

Untitled

Naked Pink Elephant

Love Robot

Woman with a Strap-On

Bad Bunny

Frog Prince

Uncircumsized Penis

Posing in Snakeskin Shoes

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Do blind people hallucinate on LSD?