The dancer Kayla Hamilton says that she does her best work with her eyes closed. Having no vision on her left side can pose challenges for staying in sync with a partner, but dancing also relies on feeling and mood. She challenges preconceptions about how to watch dance with a performance piece for which each member of the audience is asked to wear an eye patch.

For Evans himself, blindness has been another means of othering. A gay African-American man who has faced racism and homophobia, he describes how he tried “passing as sighted” — resisting using a cane in public — for as long as he could. But although he feared losing opportunities as a filmmaker, he says the experience has had silver linings. His limited field of vision, he says, has helped him concentrate on performances, enabling him to tune out the distractions of the surrounding crew.

Despite its focus on as fluid and mysterious a subject as art, “Vision Portraits” addresses blindness in concrete, comprehensible terms. (By contrast, Derek Jarman’s landmark diary film “Blue,” an allusive monologue against a blue screen, approached sightlessness through abstraction.) And although it’s relatively short at 78 minutes, it has the power, however briefly, to alter your perception.

Vision Portraits

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes.