Being raised a good Roman Catholic, I always latched onto the fact that 33 was the age Christ was crucified. You know I'm very spiritual and religious and I like to think I practice all the great religions of the world. But one of my favorite teachers was Jesus of Nazareth and he had his cheat chance at 33 and so did I. So I don't really remember. I think I was probably a lot more scattered and a lot less peaceful before all of this.

You came into the world by yourself. And you know what? No matter how close you are to your friends, loved ones, family members you have to leave by yourself.

So, I hope that I can say this without sounding like a kook. I haven't really ever said this in public. I've said it to a few close friends of mine. In my experience CMV Retinis is an end-stage disease. It's what you get right before you die.

I got the sight loss early with a strong body and a strong will. Then I started to read Tibetan and Buddhist literature on tape.

There are people in those communities who experience extreme pain and suffering and they get joy from it because their idea of it is that if they're taking that on, then their community that sounds them doesn't have to. They are then chosen to experience it. Because I have dozens and dozens of friends who've come out the other side from HIV and have no damage to their sight.

So, I started as a way to not go crazy, thinking that perhaps I was the person from my group who was strong enough to lose their sight and make something out of so that I can take it from everone else and in that reading of the Tibetan literature, that's how they explain Christ. As going to the extreme and giving his life for everyone else's life.

If I would dare compare myself to those people, it would be in that I have fun believing that I'm the only one who survived with this little bit of sight and instead of learning how to knit again, I'm trying very much to communicate my experience of the world with my photographs.

At the end of each opening, I feel all the energy is drawn out of me and I also feel that personal battery is charged up by a million volts. I remember after the first opening everybody came up to me and was touching me and I was overwhelmed. When fifty people are touching you for four hours, I just leaned up against the wall and slid down to the floor and started to cry from joy and exhaustion because I felt depleted and overwhelmed by the attention.

There's a lovely biblical passage where Christ goes on a feast day into a crowd and he's surrounded by throngs of people and there's no way to tell anyone from anyone else and he said who touched my robe? One of his disciples said "Well, Master there's a thousand people around, how do you know someone touched your robe?" And he said "someone touched it" and turns around and sees a woman there who needs him and he says to her "your faith has made you whole."

She gathered what she needed from him and he realized that. I love that.

I think it is inevitable that people will take away from this story "Holy smoke, you really can do anything with your life that you want to do, no matter what the obstacles are."

Here is a man who was very, very successful before he got the CMV Retinitis which was the result of an AIDS-related stroke. He said "Well, I only know photography, so I'm still going to do it." It's one of the jobs that you wouldn't think you could do without your sight. You can't drive a vehicle and you probably can't take photographs if you can't see. And yet he still managed to find a way to do it. Because what he soon realized was that he could see all the pictures in his head.

He had nothing to lose. We all live our lives with such a degree of caution. If we could only lose that a little bit, then maybe most of us would pursue more of our dreams.

He has a different kind of career now, because he was doing commercial photography before. I think it was much more lucrative for him to do that kind of work, so he was very monetarily successful. Now what he has accrued is a huge amount of personal growth and personal success. Yes, he's making money, but not hand over fist the way that he was when he had huge name clients. One of the things that we didn't put in the story, what happened to him as a commercial photographer.

When he was a commercial photographer, he shot for major retailers, name-brand companies that you would have heard of. One of them was Martha Stewart. When he got the diagnosis of stroke and blindness from HIV, all his clients dropped him. The lone exception was Martha Stewart. Once a year he does a layout for her. In fact, when Dugdale was in the hospital, after the diagnosis, she and her staff came to see him. They brought him all kinds of gifts, which as you would expect from Martha Stewart, were all perfectly wrapped and appropriate for the occasion. But she was there for him, and saw him as a human being. Every other client just saw their bottom line. And who knows how they would react now, if they were to see his works.

We interviewed him at a gallery in New York City called the Wessel O'Connor Gallery. Once a year they host a John Dugdale layout. We interviewed the gallery owner, but it did not make it into the story. Perhaps the editorial team here felt it was more poignant to have Dugdale solo in the story. His biggest fans are the two men who run the gallery. They said "Every year, we host one of his shows. Not because we don't have submissions from other people, we get over 200 submissions a year, but he holds a very special place in our hearts. His cyanotype work is the best in the world. And we don't know how many more collections we'll have from him."

Dugdale's photos are developed in sunlight, he can only work at certain times of the year when there is more sunlight, so it's usually in the spring and early summer that he does his photo-shoots, in kind of a blitz. Then he has to take the rest of the year off because he doesn't have enough daylight to work with.

Also sunlight is the only way that Dugdale can develop the photos, because with his illness, he physically can not work with the darkroom chemicals. So he had to look to other methods of developing photos, and hence this has become his signature type.

I was really moved talking to him. When I left I was sad. I was sad to say goodbye to him.

He gave me an autographed copy of his books, which I didn't ask for, but they are beautiful books and I'm really happy to have them. I think his work is exceptional. I have two eyes that work just fine, and it doesn't matter what I would do, or what I could learn about the camera and light, I would never be able to do what he does. So to think that he sees it all in his head, is a very extraordinary gift that he has. And his is among us to inspire us all.