Blind Photographers

After watching Proof and reading about Joceyln Moorhouse’s inspiration to write the story after hearing a story about a blind photographer, I decided to search for blind photographers myself on the Internet. Google instantly gave me 10,600 websites, articles and pictures that were relevant to the phrase, “blind photographer.” The idea of being blind, yet channeling your creative energy into an art that is purely visual is astonishing to me. I don’t think any non-visually impaired individual will ever truly understand the relationship between photography and the visually impaired. There seems to be a sort of magical connection between the impossibility of this relationship.

Google’s search varied from articles about exhibitions, newspaper articles and photography programs for blind people. There was one article that really stuck out to me the most. The San Francisco Chronicle had written an article about a man named Pete Eckert who had hadn’t always been blind, but lost his sight due to a eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa. Eckert, however isn’t just an ordinary photographer. Besides being blind, he also works with infrared photography. Eckert describes using all his senses the feel the world around him. "I can see lots of ... really weird things," Eckert says in the Chronicle article written by Delfin Vigil. Eckert is also quoted in the article by Vigil saying, "I can 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."
The photo shown here is one of Eckert’s and is titled “Saloon.” In the article, Vigil talks about Eckert’s photography process. Vigil describes that the photo 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.” The process of feeling and understanding all the aspects of an environment before photographing it makes perfect sense to me. So many people are so quick to take a photograph of a location, event, or area before they even know all its nooks and crannies. As also shown through the character Martin in Proof, blind photographers may be visually impaired, but their intuition and relationship with their other senses is well beyond those of sighted artists.