In recent years, photographs by persons with visual impairments are increasingly shifting into new arenas: from sociological contexts of therapeutic pedagogies to aesthetic contexts of art on public display. In this shift, discursive tropes about vision, disability and artistic practice emerge. Moreover, these tropes emerge around images—but a much-needed attention to the images is habitually bypassed in curatorial as well as artistic statements in favor of an emphasis on the troubling details of the artist’s life. As a consequence, the emancipatory agency of the images is undermined when it is unmoored from its visual source. This article adds nuance to a biographical approach by tending to the image with a rare combination of art history, critical media theory and disability studies on functional normality and variation. The focal point is a photograph by Kurt Weston, who relates his work to experiences of otherness that follow an identification with homosexuality, AIDS and blindness—an otherness whose inclusive quality plays out in the image yet remains unaccounted for by the surrounding discourse without in-depth image analysis. Here, otherness is addressed in dialogue with the notions of tactics and catharsis to unfold the performative operation taking place within and around the image. Visual and verbal statements reveal narratives that overlap yet also diverge, holding implications beyond the singular image for a society where ableist notions of normality are taken for granted.