These Two Brothers Are Trying to Cure Blindness, One Henley at a Time

Walk into Bradford and Bryan Manning’s SoHo loft, and the first thing you see is a giant eye-chart-style painting that, instead of the standard Es in backward and forward formats, spells out the name of their clothing company, Two Blind Brothers.

The Mannings both have Stargardt’s disease, a genetic disorder of the retina that causes the body to process vitamin A incorrectly. Byproducts of the vitamin accumulate on the macula, in the back of the eye, eventually resulting in a loss of central vision, as if perpetually looking at the world through an eclipse. Onset is typically in childhood. Bradford and Bryan, now 32 and 26 years old, respectively, were each diagnosed with the disease at seven years of age. To the brothers, the world appears as the sun does during an eclipse, blacked out in the center, and in their case, blurry around the periphery.