SIGHT UNSEEN catalog - California Museum of Photography ...

28
pete eckert sAcrAmeNTo, cAliforNiA
“I slip photos under the door from the world
of the blind to be viewed in the light of the
sighted.”
To Pete Eckert, blindness is his advantage.
“Vision is so strong that it masks other
senses, other abilities; it even overrides
visualization. Sighted photographers always
talk about the difficulty of what they call
‘seeing.’ I tell them ‘If you can’t see, it’s
because your vision is getting in the way.’”
Eckert holds a degree in sculpture from the
Art Institute of Boston, and degrees in art
and design from California State University
San Francisco. But it was only after he
became completely blind in the mid-1980s
that Eckert began to pursue photography.
He started with a 1954 Kodak Retina IIa, a
camera with infrared focus settings on the
German-made lens. “I’m blind, so making
photographs using a nonvisible wavelength
really appealed to me.” Eckert has an adventurous
streak—he owns and occasionally
rides a motorcycle and holds a first degree
black belt in Tae Kwon do. Streetwise and
unafraid, Eckert undertook much of his
early infrared shooting late at night in far
flung precincts of urban San Francisco.
“The human brain is wired for optical input,
for visualization,” says Eckert. “The optic
nerve bundle is huge. Even with no input,
or maybe especially with no input, the brain
Cathedral
keeps creating images. I’m a very visual
person, I just can’t see.”
Eckert considers his current mode of imagemaking
“one shot cinema.” The aim is to
create open-ended narratives and capture
them in a single frame. Eckert conjures up
increasingly complex images and devises
a way to shoot them on location or, more
frequently, in the 30-foot deep studio he
has built in his Sacramento backyard. He
casts friends and neighbors and builds
props. He sets up his Toyo 4” x 5” composite
body view camera on a tripod. He notched
the focus rail with set focus points using a
diamond-coated jewelry file. When all is
ready, Eckert throws the switches that drop
his studio into total darkness and opens
the camera. Eckert roams the space and
“paints” his image with light.
“I use any light source I can understand.”
His palette includes flashlights, candles,
lasers, lighters, even black powder. The
roving light is an uncanny substitute for the
artist’s missing sight. The touch of the light
sketches an image onto the film. Areas that
the light misses remain blanks, darkness,
unseen.
Shutter open, Eckert moves through the
darkness deploying his lights to build the
image he sees in his mind. “Where I’m
going is so different that I have to have a
plan. I structure all my shoots the same
way. I visualize and then I adapt. I assume
it will be about three-quarters the way I
planned, and a quarter what happens.”
The photograph, of course, is a record of a
scene before the camera. But with Eckert,
it captures more: the artist’s gesture, the
passage of time, the realization of a mental
image, and the outward manifestation of a
purely inner mode of seeing.