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Photo collection: Wheelchair signs from around the world

The sign is the categorisation made visible. I photograph them wherever I travel: look at what each one depicts, a person or a function.

What it is

I photograph wheelchair signs wherever I travel. Not because the signs are wrong, but because each one is a small public record of how a society categorises: who a space expects, who gets a special route, who is depicted and who is assumed.

Look at what each sign depicts. Some show a person: then the space is for a kind of body, and the categories tend to multiply, from one symbol to three, to six. Some show a function instead: a multi-purpose space, a door, a slope. The shift from person to function is, in my experience, the single easiest nonclusive move to explain, and these photographs are how I explain it.

The photographs come from wherever I have travelled, and the collection keeps growing.

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Save any of the photographs above and use them under the license below. If you want an original in full resolution, write to me.

License: Open Educational Resource

This is an Open Educational Resource (OER). Everything I have created here is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).

You may:

  • Share: copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
  • Adapt: remix, transform, and build upon the material.

Under the following condition:

Attribution: give appropriate credit and indicate if changes were made. A simple "Per-Olof Hedvall, peohedvall.com" is enough.

This applies only to content I have created. Any third-party content, such as quoted images, may be under a different license and is marked accordingly.

Read the full CC BY 4.0 license →

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