HOST (Jennifer) (00:02):
Hello, welcome to this podcast called Finding Inspiration. It's a 20 or so minute weekly podcast where we interview someone with an amazing story. After the show, I know you're gonna feel energized, invigorated, and inspired. I'm Jennifer Weissmann. Welcome to Finding Inspiration. Today we're gonna speak with a completely blind photographer. Pete Eckert is a very well-known photographer. He spent half his life sighted and the other half completely blind. We're gonna learn what it's like to be a blind man in this sighted world and learn about some of the dangers that blind people experience. We're also gonna hear from Pete about how martial arts prepared him for a life of blindness. And here are a few fascinating highlights of my conversation with Pete Eckert.
GUEST (Pete) (01:05):
I look for metaphors of blindness to describe my world to the sighted world. What does that say about my world? You know that talks about your world. I'm no longer in your world. I'm not gonna hide from society. And I went after a black belt and TaeKwonDo so I could handle myself on the street and that's what I intended to do. I was not going to sit down and cry, but to engage in life -- to the best of my ability.
HOST (Jennifer) (01:27):
So welcome, Pete. Let's talk a little bit about your background. You were a totally sighted child. I think you said you wore glasses. Other than that, you had no problems with your vision. You were accepted to Yale University for a Master’s in Architecture. Then in your mid-twenties, you got a diagnosis of Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP). Take us back. Tell us what was happening to you?
GUEST (Pete) (01:49):
I was making money as a carpenter, and I even drove a motor Guzzi motorcycle. And my lovely wife was my then-girlfriend. When I was 26, strangely I started seeing a pastel Stripe and my left eye. I went to the eye doctor and they couldn't figure it out. And there was some misdiagnosis before I found out I had Retinitis Pigmentosa known as RP. The way I found out I was gonna go totally blind. Dr. Odel was talking to somebody on TV. This is in the eighties and a woman called in and said her son-in-law had an RP and what was going to happen? This TV doctor said unfortunately RP takes vision from the outer ages of the retina until the person is totally blind.
HOST (Jennifer) (02:29):
And that was the first time you'd heard complete blindness was your future?
GUEST (Pete) (02:35):
Yes, you can imagine I'm alone watching the TV. My whole life was visual. I did the artwork. I made things. I basically survived on my creativity and wits. I now learn that I was gonna go totally blind was devastating. It was like being hit by a hammer.
HOST (Jennifer) (02:50):
RP is a somewhat rare eye disorder. But did any of your specialists even mention RP as a possibility?
GUEST (Pete) (02:58):
No, I was actually misdiagnosed. One of the doctors thought I had a retinal detachment and inflammation. And so he was injecting into my eye.
HOST (Jennifer) (03:10):
With a needle?
GUEST (Pete) (03:10):
Yeah, a needle in my eye. And you had to watch the whole procedure as they pull back the edges of your eyes and dig around in there and then stick your eye. There's no anesthesia or anything. You have to watch the whole procedure and not move.
HOST (Jennifer) (03:23):
And your diagnosis was complete blindness?
GUEST (Pete) (03:26):
Right. I found that out much later. I challenged that doctor's diagnosis. I had access to a medical library. I found evidence that he was not correct. And I pushed the point and got another opinion. And that doctor did a test. He said it's definitely RP. And he got up and left. No extra information. Explaining what RP was or anything at all. Nothing.
HOST (Jennifer) (03:47):
It's a horrible diagnosis. Your future will be as a blind person. What do you do? How did you prepare yourself to be self-sufficient and blind? What was your plan?
GUEST (Pete) (04:00):
There was a lot of hesitation. I was a carpenter and a sculptor. I had degrees in industrial design and sculpture at that point. I was intending to go to Yale for graduate school in Architecture. There was the expense of going to Yale. And I started to think I would not be able to get clients as a blind architect. I thought probably won't work. So I got an MBA instead at a lesser school. My plan was to get an MBA for financial stability. And a black belt in TaeKwonDo so I could handle myself on the street like a blind person. I actually earned two black belts in TaeKwonDo. I competed as if I was sighted including all the qualifications. I did as if I was sighted. And the instructor that I don't want anybody in the class last to know I'm blind until after I get a black belt. Why -- because their attitudes will change and they'll baby me if they know I'm blind. What I'm gonna run into on the street is gonna be harsh. And I need to know my skills are solid and I can do what I intend to do. What I intended to do was not to sit down and cry to engage in life to the best of my ability.
HOST (Jennifer) (05:01):
Other than defending yourself, what skills did Martial Arts teach you specifically?
GUEST (Pete) (05:06):
All blind people use echolocation – or their ears to navigate in the world. You can use a cane. and a guide dog. And I use both. But in martial arts sparring when I sparred with people it was always at full speed. Remember, they didn't know I was blind. I learned how to use sound to tell when something was approaching. After that, I realized I've got this skill of awareness -- now let's bring it out into my world. You know - not the fighting skill but rather how to navigate, how to find things, how to avoid things. So I used martial arts sparring as a feedback loop to tell me that I definitely had the skills to navigate the world. So simple things like finding the top of a staircase. I do by sound. I don't count the steps. I don't use a cane or a dog. I just listen for the open space at the top.
HOST (Jennifer) (05:50):
As you're speaking, I'm thinking to myself, I've never considered the top of a stair landing has a different sound than walking up or down the stairs. That's interesting.
GUEST (Pete) (05:59):
You have so much blunt brainpower. And when you take vision out of that, it's not that your brain power increases. Your body can access more computing power because sight is taken out. The reason is the nerve bundles in your body used for sight are huge. And so you have all this extra wattage that's not being utilized for sight purposes and your brain is starved for information. What I did was a logical move. I used sparring and martial arts to first find that skill and then to refine it as a feedback loop. Then later on, when I moved out of the dojo into the world, I used my camera as the feedback loop.
HOST (Jennifer) (06:35):
Now we're gonna get into talking out your new chosen profession --- a blind photographer. So exactly how does your camera work as a feedback loop?
GUEST (Pete) (06:45):
I divide my artwork and my efforts into two groups. There's the event -- what I'm doing, and then there's the product --the photo. And so the event of taking the photo, it's all me. And I'm very strict about that. , I do take some information from sighted people, but I'm very careful that they don't touch the camera so what's produced is all me. And then the feedback loop, I ask sighted friends to describe the photos to me while it's still fresh in my memory. That's my process. So there's an event and product.
HOST (Jennifer) (07:13):
I know you have a special camera with notches on it to help guide you. You talked about two phrases: "I'm a tourist in a sighted world" and ‘Fingerprints of Blindness’. I understand the first phrase but tell us about the second -- Fingerprints of Blindness.
GUEST (Pete) (07:28):
I can use a point-and-shoot camera, a digital point-and-shoot camera, and make it look like I'm sighted. I can target people and compose the image by sound. But what does that say about my world? That talks about your world. I'm no longer in your world. My reality's much different and some of it's subject to misinformation. I describe to you I have a sense I call bone light. So think of a person that has an arm amputated and can feel that missing arm. A strange effect that happened to me after I lost my sight is I can see my skeletal structure and light is emanating from it. And I'm holding my hand up to my face right now. I can see the bones in my hand. Now, this is where it gets strange. If this isn't strange enough.
HOST (Jennifer) (08:11):
I'm with you, but it is a little strange.
GUEST (Pete) (08:13):
I move my hand behind my skull-- where your sight wouldn't go. And I can still see my hand.
HOST (Jennifer) (08:19):
How exactly do you do that?
GUEST (Pete) (08:21):
I asked a Tai Chi master what was happening. And he just said -- Chi. I am not a Tai Chi master. Some of this stuff is beyond me because it sounds pretty crazy. But I decided I'm gonna put this light into my photos. To describe to you what I do with my photos. I look for metaphors of blindness. It's to describe my world to the sighted world. Both darkness and blindness are related. So I shoot in a totally dark studio. I shoot at night out in the world. I look for metaphors so this bone light is definitely part of my life. I include that in some of my photos to portray my world to you. I have to find the fingerprints of blindness or metaphors of blindness as a method of translation.
GUEST (Pete) (09:05):
There's misperception on a windy day. You know, I can hear a stop sign. I can hear the sign itself, and if I'm close enough, I can hear the pole, but I have to be very close because the sound shadow of the pole. You can think of a rock and a river and the sound going around it is so short. I have to be very close to hear it. I can hear a telephone pole from 10 feet away and the sound wrapping around it. The stop sign on a windy day is vibrating. And so it's giving a very ethereal feedback. So I'd go up and find the stop sign and grab it and put my hand up and find out the shape of the stop sign. So once I started going up and touching things, I started building a sound vocabulary. It's kind of like a baby learning to see or interpret words. As I'm walking around parking meters, I will hear the parking meter heads go blip, blip, blip, as you're walking by just floating in space. The telephone poles are too short for the sound shadow. It's not long enough for me to hear it. And so I walk up and grab the parking meter and say "ah this is what a parking meter sounds like."
HOST (Jennifer) (10:01):
Could a sighted person hear a parking meter or a stop sign?
GUEST (Pete) (10:04):
Parking meter, maybe not. But a stop sign. Definitely.
HOST (Jennifer) (10:07):
Your story is absolutely incredible. You made a Herculean effort of preparing yourself for blindness, and then you chose a profession that would generally be considered a sighted person's profession. And you've become a very successful photographer. I think you were recently in a Google ad?
GUEST (Pete) (10:26):
Yes, it was an ad for Be My Eyes.
HOST (Jennifer) (10:29):
What is the most surprising thing to you about being blind?
GUEST (Pete) (10:32):
I didn't know if you take sight out of your senses that you could capitalize on that extra capacity. It's not that I hear or my sense of touch is any stronger. It's just that there's more brain capacity that I can access. And so what I get out of it is a view of the world that I could not have if I had my vision. Some of it's quite beautiful, some of it's quite scary.
HOST (Jennifer) (10:55):
What part of it is scary?
GUEST (Pete) (10:56):
It depends on your sense of humor. I always try to be positive, but it can get quite dark. And if you look through my photos overall, there's a bit of psychological darkness. I think that's a reflection of the struggle.
HOST (Jennifer) (11:12):
You’ve recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, another large hurdle for you to leap over. I know a man with your focus will find a way forward but that cannot be an easy diagnosis.
GUEST (Pete) (11:27):
Yeah, God does have a sense of humor. And I'm trying to look at this positively: like what can Parkinson's bring to me that's positive. It's difficult for me to work with my hand tools. I taught myself how to use a lath. I'm losing some skills and I was wondering what should I do to replace these skills? You know, what can I do that's positive? What I'm working on right now is I'm shooting in the California redwood forest as background shots. And then I'm shooting in churches to get the stained glass. And I want the stained glass to be double exposed into the Redwood forest. As if they were just hanging in space. To describe the Redwood Forest -- these are enormous trees. And it really feels like you're in a cathedral or a very holy place. I didn't want something that was overly religious. But I wanted to say, I feel like this forest is a cathedral. Right now I'm playing the stained glass part.
HOST (Jennifer) (12:20):
I'm asking you about Parkinson's disease as a blind man and your spin on it is how to find the glass is half full and that there's something positive and beautiful about it. You're an extraordinary person to face such difficulties with such such positivity. I don't know that I could do that.
GUEST (Pete) (12:41):
You don't know if you're not there. You don't know how much power you have until you get there. There are people that have done much more extraordinary things than me. I just try to stay positive and playful.
HOST (Jennifer) (12:50):
You do have sort of a dark sense of humor. Pete, I'm gonna be honest with you.
GUEST (Pete) (12:55):
Yeah, it is dark, but it can be hilarious. It seems kind of silly, but it is positive and it's not making fun of the disability. WIth my Parkinson's, I'm on a search for something positive to do with it. You know, I'm not gonna hide from society. You know, now sometimes when I'm shaking and, and struggling young women open doors for me. Which at first I was going -- oh man,I must look so old. But now I think it's kind of amazing.
HOST (Jennifer) (13:19):
What's the future for blind people in the 21st century,
Speaker 2 (13:23):
This is the best time in history to be a blind person. Technology has moved ahead by leaps and bounds. And so it is possible to be employed with a guide dog and you can go places and do things that you couldn't do even just 20 years ago.
HOST (Jennifer) (13:38):
What did the Corona pandemic do to you and to blind people? Was it difficult? Was it more difficult?
GUEST (Pete) (13:46):
The pandemic has been very bad. But blind people are very isolated anyway. And so now that you can work in a home office - it actually leveled the playing field a bit. I'm not asking people to hide blindness, but there is still a social stigma. This can be avoided just by working in a home office. You know, things have changed very quickly. Actually, I'm happy to say that blind people are the most viable than they've ever been.
HOST (Jennifer) (14:09):
There were so many dangers I hadn't even considered. So we heard the bark. We know you have a seeing eye dog. Do you move around a lot with him?
GUEST (Pete) (14:15):
I'm guessing better than 50,000 miles in his lifetime.
HOST (Jennifer) (14:19):
You walked more than 50,000 miles with one dog. That's incredible.
GUEST (Pete) (14:25):
An average day. I'd walk about 10 miles.
HOST (Jennifer) (14:27):
That's amazing. You're in good shape. Do you ever get concerned for your safety walking around with all these super-quiet electric vehicles?
GUEST (Pete) (14:33):
Yes, and everything has now changed. And there are more aggressive survivors and they're starting put houses and apartments in the alleys. So people are driving down the alleys as if there are roads. You have to listen to them. But in short, it's more dangerous now for sure with the EV cars too.
HOST (Jennifer) (14:47):
You have such a positive spin on your life on whatever circumstances are before you. You truly embody inspiration. You respect yourself and accept your situation, and there's no victimhood at all. I am in awe of how you manage and handle your life. I wish you all the success and lots and lots of years of good health, steady health, joyful times for you and Amy.
GUEST (Pete) (15:18):
Thank you.
HOST (Jennifer) (15:20):
Thank you for joining us this week on Finding Inspiration. Hey, I would appreciate it. If you would click on that subscribe button and share this podcast with a friend, see you next week. I'm Jennifer Weissmann.