This is a truly exceptional story: Pete Eckert didn’t take photography seriously. Until he went totally blind. Eckert was trained in sculpture and industrial design and planned to study architecture at Yale, but then he startetd to loose is sight. He suffered from Retinitis Pigmentosa and since there is currently no cure for this disease, he went completely blind. After years of recovering and re-orinentation, Pete Eckert discovered his mother’s old camera – a coincidence that should become an initial point in his life. Almost immediately, he felt compelled to dedicate himself to this intensely visual medium despite his devastating diagnosis.
Pete Eckers remembers: “I found the camera fascinating and discovered it had an infrared setting. I thought a blind guy doing photos in a non-visible wavelength would be amusing. I was hooked. I knew nothing about film or manual cameras.” Almost 30 years later, Pete Eckert is an award-winning photographer.
Eckert takes his photos mostly at night, when his hometown of Sacramento is quiet and empty, and he can move around more easily. Although they clearly depict the isolation from the world of those who see, Eckert found ways of turning his disability into an advantage:
I am not bound by the assumptions of the sighted or their assumed limits.
I am trying to cut a new path as a blind visual artist. Sighted people don’t help me make the art. They do give me feedback before I do the final large prints. I shoot the image, develop the film, and I do the contact print. I do what I call sample prints. There is a clear dividing line. I need the feedback loop to afford making large final products. I could cut sighted people completely out of my process. I could do a write up about the event of taking the photos. The negatives, contact sheets, and write up about the event could be the final product. I like doing the dramatic large prints better. I want sighted people involved. It is a good bridge between the blind and sighted. I want to be included in the world and accepted.
. . . Occasionally people refuse to believe I am blind. I am a visual person. I just can’t see.
Also, find Pete Eckert featured in The Avant/Garde Diaries:
Photos: Screenshot.
