Can a photographer be blind? Can a car be art? Volkswagen and the blind photographer.

"I didn’t take photography seriously until I went totally blind. I was trained in sculpture and industrial design. I have always been a visual person and planned to study architecture at Yale, but then I started to lose my sight. A doctor coolly told me I had Retinitis Pigmentosa and left the room without further comment. (...)



One day I was cleaning out a drawer and found my mother in laws’ old camera. She had passed away a few years earlier. I like mechanical things, so Amy found me fooling with it. I asked her to describe the settings to me so I could figure out how to use the 1950’s Kodak. 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. (...)

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 mind’s 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. (...)

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."

Pete Eckert



"The design of the new Arteon leaves a lasting impression. But can it also be felt by someone who can’t see it?"

"For his amazing artworks of the new Arteon he started by approaching to the car very sensitive. Slowly, almost reverently, he traced the lines from the exterior to the interior and internalized every square centimetre of the bodywork. Until he has captured the complete Arteon in his mind. Or, as he puts it: 'The Arteon emerges before my mind’s eye.'"

Volkswagen



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