For most photographers, being selected for a national park artist residency is a major milestone. For Ted Tahquechi, it is also something larger, a chance to bring disability-led innovation, tactile image-making, and accessible art practice into one of the country’s most iconic landscapes.

Rocky Mountain National Park has selected Tahquechi as part of its 2026 Artist-in-Residence cohort, placing his work in a lineage that stretches back decades. The park notes that its residency program began in 1984 and that it has hosted more than 200 artists working across disciplines that include writing, music, quilting, sculpture, photography, and painting.

Tahquechi’s inclusion stands out not only because he is a photographer, but because the work he plans to bring into the park pushes photography beyond the frame. His practice combines landscape photography with tactile translation, producing 3D tactile prints that allow images to be explored through touch. In a field that still too often treats access as an afterthought, his residency points toward a different model, one where accessibility is part of the artistic process itself.

That distinction matters. National parks are often interpreted almost entirely through sight. They are promoted through panoramic overlooks, dramatic light, color, scale, and distance. Tahquechi’s work starts from a different question: how might a landscape be experienced by people who do not engage with it visually, or not only visually?

His answer is tactile photography.

On his own site, Tahquechi describes a process in which light and texture from an image are extracted and translated into multilayered tactile prints using 3D printing. The result is not a decorative add-on to a photograph, but a physical interpretation of the image, something that can communicate shape, contour, depth, and movement through the hand.

That approach has become a defining part of his current work. Rather than treating photography as a medium available only to sighted audiences, Tahquechi’s tactile process opens the possibility that a landscape image can be encountered in more than one way. In practical terms, that means thinking twice about composition, once for the eye and once for touch. It means asking which lines need to be emphasized, which textures need to rise, and which visual details need to be simplified or reorganized so they can be understood tactually.

Rock faces, tree lines, ridges, water edges, and layered terrain can all become part of that tactile vocabulary. A mountain scene that might read as atmospheric in a conventional print has to become structurally legible in a tactile version. That translation is both technical and artistic, and it is one reason Tahquechi’s work has drawn attention within conversations about accessibility and contemporary art.

The Rocky Mountain residency offers an unusually strong setting for that work. According to the National Park Service, each artist in the 2026 cohort will spend two weeks in residence during the summer season. During that time, they will present two public programs, a lecture-style presentation in the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center Auditorium and a family-friendly interactive program in the Fall River Visitor Center Discovery Room. The park also notes that, at the completion of the residency, each artist donates a representative work to the park’s unofficial collection, managed by Rocky Mountain Conservancy.

For Tahquechi, that structure is especially significant because it creates room not just for finished work, but for public engagement. Visitors will not only be able to hear him speak about the ideas behind his practice, they will also have the opportunity to encounter it in a more direct, hands-on format. In the context of disability art, that is not a minor detail. It suggests a public program model in which access is not tucked away in interpretation panels or separate accommodations, but placed at the center of the artistic encounter.

The gear he brings into the field is also part of the story. In a previous post on Blind Travels, Tahquechi detailed the camera setup he uses for landscape photography: a Canon 5D Mark IV, a heavy Manfrotto tripod, and a Canon 24-105mm L lens, with a 17-40mm wide lens sometimes added to the kit. He also noted that his lenses are fitted with B+W circular polarizers and UV filters, and he described his preference for a heavier tripod with practical humor, explaining that there is always a chance he might bump into his own gear and that a sturdier tripod has saved his camera more than once.

That kind of setup makes sense for Rocky Mountain National Park. A versatile midrange zoom allows for both broader landscape views and tighter studies of structure and texture, while a stable tripod is critical in changing mountain light. More importantly, the equipment reflects an approach to photography rooted in reliability and deliberate fieldwork rather than speed or spectacle.

Tahquechi’s residency also arrives at a moment when disability art is receiving broader public attention, but still fighting for deeper institutional integration. Too often, accessible art is framed as supplemental, admirable, or niche. Tahquechi’s inclusion in Rocky Mountain National Park’s official residency program pushes against that framing. It places tactile, disability-informed photographic practice in a major public setting and recognizes it not as outreach attached to art, but as art itself.

That is what makes this selection noteworthy beyond the usual residency announcement. It is not simply that a photographer will spend time making work in the park. It is that a disabled artist whose practice is explicitly concerned with access, translation, and nonvisual engagement will be doing so within one of the country’s best-known public landscapes.

For DisabledArt.com readers, that matters on several levels. It is a career milestone for an artist whose work already bridges photography, technology, and tactile interpretation. It is a meaningful example of disability-led practice entering a high-visibility cultural program. And it is a reminder that access can generate new forms, new methods, and new ways of understanding landscape itself.

Tahquechi’s residency is scheduled for August, when he will create new work in Rocky Mountain National Park and lead both a lecture and an interactive public program as part of the residency model. The park says program details will be posted on its calendar when available.

In the simplest terms, Rocky Mountain National Park selected a photographer. In the more important sense, it selected an artist whose work asks who photography is for, how landscape can be shared, and what happens when access is treated not as a correction, but as a creative force.

 

Below is an example of Ted’s tactile photography work. More can be seen at www.tactilephotos.com