Appreciating the physical beauty of an object doesn’t necessarily involve eyesight. Volkswagen just created a campaign with blind photographer Pete Eckert to express the beauty of its new Arteon.
Eckert is from Sacramento, California. He lost his sight when he was an adult due to an illness, but that did not stop him publishing and winning awards with his photography. “I am a visual person. I just can’t see” is the way he describes himself.
For the Arteon project, which is his first automobile project, he gained sensory impressions of the Arteon by feeling and tapping the car, then building an image of it in his mind’s eye with the aid of sound, touch and memory. He then performed almost all the working steps himself, including setting up his Mamiya medium-format camera and developing the films. He took photos of the car at very slow speeds in dim light, during which he experimented with long shutter times, multiple light sources, and intensive colouring and shapes. Eckert’s assistant would describe the image composition after the shoot to make sure his idea has been conveyed.
The “light paintings” Eckert created are beyond extraordinary. Watch the video below to see how the magic happened.
