There's a hole in our budget (dear Liza, a hole!)

Have you ever got two thirds of the way through the month and found your pockets bare? Got to November and found you’ve already spent your annual budget? Gone to pick up your car from the garage and found to be told there were complications and the cost is more than you thought? Gone over-budget on a house extension? Then you know what it feels like to dip your hand in your wallet and find only dust or moths. 

Back in March, when the email arrived from Spain with the quote from Estudios Durero for the relief print of Sheffield boxer, Dave Howe, we felt winded. It was not cheap and much more than we’d thought, if indeed we’d even taken time to think how much such an image might cost. How could we tell Clive that it couldn't be done? Once we’d picked ourselves off the ground and realised that we only had to ask, we raised all the money in just five days, a sign of all the love and goodwill out there for Clive.

And it kept coming. So we asked Clive and Wendy what they’d like us to do with the extra. Clive was very clear: he wanted to share this new concept with a wider public and was taken with the idea of making photography accessible to the blind and partially-sighted. The idea of an exhibition displaying regular prints of Clive’s photos with their tactile equivalent was born.

The exhibition will take place as part of the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind from 18th to 28th September (more details will follow on this blog, our Facebook page and Twitter feed.

We’ve chosen 12 of Clive’s images and 8 images from friends of his to be displayed as pairs of regular gallery photo prints and their tactile equivalents. They will be prepared by the Tactile Image and Map department of the Royal National Institute of Blind People. Sue King and Michelle Lee at the RNIB are pulling all the stops out to produce the images in time and they’ve been kind to us in the quote for their work. But we have a hole in our budget, dear Liza, a hole (do you remember this song?)

Can you help us fix it? Have a look at the revised totaliser to see how much we need to raise. The RNIB tell us that, to their knowledge, there has never such an exhibition with the aim of making photography accessible to the blind and partially-sighted, something Clive feels that is “really important”.