Romeo Edmead is using his fingers to unlock a world he has never experienced before. Edmead lost his sight when he was just two years old, so he has always had a complicated relationship with art and museums.

Although he has heard of classical paintings, he says school trips to museums were uncomfortable. “I knew what my friends would experience, but I wouldn’t necessarily experience it because they could use their sense of sight and I didn’t have that,” said Edmead. He describes running his fingers over a 3D version of Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” at a library for the blind in New York City, as a kind of “freedom”.

  “In life we’ve all heard of famous painters and their works. But to me, that’s all they were,” he said. “They were like vocabulary words I could write down on the page but I didn’t necessarily know how to put a physical picture together. Something like this presents that opportunity and that freedom to get a better understanding. ”

The man behind the 3D printed works is John Olson. A former photographer for LIFE magazine, Olson co-founded a company called 3D Photoworks that developed and patented their own printing process for works of fine art. “We begin with taking a conventional two dimensional image and change it to 3D data. Once that data has been changed, we send it to a machine that sculpts the data. It gives that image length, width, depth and texture. And once that’s been sculpted, it goes through a printing process, which produces a three dimensional print with length, width, depth and texture,” said Olson.

It took Olson seven years to develop the method, but now he’s moving full speed ahead. He’s raising money to scale up the production. “There are 285 million blind and sight impaired world-wide. One person goes blind in the U.S. every 11 minutes. So our goal is to make art and photography available to them, first in this country and then beyond,” said Olson.