One Cool Free Idea

Pete Eckert trained in sculpture and industrial design, and planned to study architecture at Yale when he started losing his sight. With the dual goals of still being able to make a living, and protecting himself once blind, Eckert set his Herculean sights on the future; earning an MBA and a black belt in martial arts before total blindness set in.

But soon, he was pushing up against the stigma of blindness by losing out on jobs due to his vision. He decided to return to art. He made woodcuts using a wood lathe and electric router. He tried making hard wood clocks. Then one day he found his mother in law’s 1950’s Kodak in a drawer, and his journey as a photographer began.

What’s nearly as extraordinary as Eckert’s artistic output is how he frames his life as a conceptual artist. Here’s a clip from Eckert’s website bio:

I am only a tourist in the sighted world.

Women talk about a glass ceiling. Blind folks face a glass front door. We can look into the workplace but aren’t allowed to enter. I do something else. I slip photos under the door from the world of the blind to be viewed in the light of the sighted. I view my work during the event of taking the shot in my minds eye. I “see“ each shot very clearly, only I use sound, touch, and memory. I am more of a conceptual artist than a photographer. My influences come from my past memory of art and what I now find in the world at large. I now ask to touch sculptures in museums too. That’s another long story.

I am not bound by the assumptions of the sighted or their assumed limits. The camera is another means of making art to me. In fact my drawings look like my photos, (at least the ones I made when I was sighted). There is a common thread uniting all my artwork. If you saw my old figurative sculptures you could tell. have a sort of bash and crash style. Even when I was very young and 125 pounds doing stone sculpture I started with big rocks and ended up with little ones.

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.

It is important to me that the sighted think about blindness.

What I get out of taking photos is the event not the picture. I do the large prints to get sighted people thinking. Talking with people in galleries builds a bridge between my mind’s eye and their vision of my work. Occasionally people refuse to believe I am blind. I am a visual person. I just can’t see.

This 4-minute documentary (thanks to PhotoJojo and Artists Wanted) tells Eckert’s incredible story.

| Artists Wanted | In Focus : Pete Eckert from Artists Wanted on Vimeo.

Pete Eckert is a totally blind person. But through his photography, he proves that he IS a visual person, he just can’t see. Artists Wanted is proud to present this truly inspiring portrait of the artist.