BLIND PHOTOGRAPHER IS A MAN OF VISION

BLIND PHOTOGRAPHER IS A MAN OF VISION
- Delfin Vigil
Sunday, February 27, 2005



It wasn't until after Pete Eckert went blind that he really started to see things.

"I can see lots of ... really weird things," Eckert says, slowly lifting his left hand toward his face and gazing directly at it. "I feel light so strongly that it allows me to see the bones in my skeleton as pulsating energy, or like in an X-ray. At times I can sort of see sound. Sometimes I can even see things from the back of my head."

With eyes in the back of his head, you'd figure Eckert might make a good schoolteacher. But that would be too easy.

Wearing jeans, a leather jacket and aviator sunglasses and standing more confidently than Uzu, his giant Bavarian shepherd guide dog, Eckert, 48, gives the impression that he likes a challenge. So after the former carpenter went blind from retinitis pigmentosa six years ago, he did the first thing he wasn't supposed to be able to do.

He became a photographer.

"The idea of a blind guy taking photos just cracked me up," Eckert says as he and Uzu visit Eckert's art photography exhibition at Varnish Fine Art studio on Natoma Street in San Francisco. The exhibition runs through Saturday and he's preparing for another in April at the Badé Museum in Berkeley next month.

About five years ago, when Eckert was still coming to terms with his loss of sight, he was cleaning out a drawer at his Sacramento home and found a camera with infrared settings. He thought about how invisible wavelengths might influence a blind person trying to use the camera. A lightbulb came on in his head, and it made him smile.

"I'd have my wife and my friends take me out in the middle of the night so I could shoot photographs," Eckert says. "Of course, they thought I was crazy, which was fine by me."

It wasn't the first time someone took Eckert for a nut.

Eckert was 28 when he was deemed legally blind, meaning that, from 20 feet, he could see less than what a person with perfect vision could see from 400 feet.

"At first, I freaked out," Eckert says. "I had two immediate fears: that I wouldn't be able to take care of myself and that I wouldn't make any money."

Eckert spent the next decade earning several degrees, including one each in sculpture and ceramics at the Art Institute of Boston and one in design and industry from San Francisco State. He also became a black belt in tae kwon do.

He was so good in the self-defense arts that he started to teach a class. When some of his students didn't believe that he could fight at full speed, Eckert picked a few of the more experienced troublemakers in the class and scheduled a day to spar. To prepare for the match, Eckert memorized the room. He took mental notes of how sounds bounced off each corner and where light and warmth entered into his blind picture. He kicked the students' butts.

"If I can learn this much about one room," Eckert says he thought, "why not do the same in the rest of the world?"

Eckert implemented that idea directly into his photography. With his brain rewired in a way that light allows him to see the skeletal structure of parts of his body, Eckert says, he paints with light and navigates through touch while listening to sounds.

"Imagination fills in the details," he says.

After completing a photo shoot, Eckert develops contact sheets, has friends give verbal feedback and then memorizes each print before choosing the final slide. Sometimes he draws on the film to add effects. He credits Time- Life Books on camera techniques and some very friendly and very patient experts at his local camera store for helping him fine-tune his craft.

He often returns to places that he frequented when he was younger and could still see well.

"Saloon" was shot at the old Saloon on Grant Avenue in North Beach, once a favorite hangout. Relying on his hazy memories of past drinking days, Eckert entered the Saloon, scoped out a spot in the back and waited for tourists to fill up the bar and create sounds of the room. He then snapped the pictures in about the same time it took to drink a Manhattan.

Blind photography is not a gimmick to Eckert.

"My pictures make you question the limits blind people face," Eckert says as gallery visitors admire the work without realizing that the blind man standing nearby is the artist. "Look. I'm competing with sighted artists."

So what's next? Driving a car?

"No way. I only ride motorcycles," he says seriously. "But just in my backyard."

You can become blind by seeing each day as

You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It's just a matter of paying attention to this miracle. --Paulo Cohelo