I once had vision.

I did sculpting in art school, and was thinking of becoming an architect. I was working as a carpenter when I began to lose my sight. I had lost almost all of it before I gave up the idea of becoming an architect. A few years passed, and I adjusted. I lost all my vision.

About 11 years ago I was cleaning out a drawer and found my mother-in-law’s old 1950s Kodak. I like mechanical things, so I asked my wife Amy to explain the settings to me. 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. I was hooked.

I’m a black belt in tai chi. Composing a photo by sound is the same as when I’m sparring with a sighted person at full speed. You have to hear where the movement is, and react intuitively. If you think of a rock in a river, the water leaves an eddy behind it. Walking down the street, I can hear when there are parking meters because they leave a sound shadow. I figured it out by hearing how the sound changed, going up and feeling with my hands, telling myself “that’s what a parking meter sounds like”.

I try to convey the world that the blind see, graphically. Sighted people tend to look at what’s in front of them as if it’s a painting. For blind people, it’s more three-dimensional. They are aware of what’s all around them, like being underwater. I can’t see people’s faces, so I don’t try to take traditional portraits. I haven’t seen my own face in 20 years. If I ever got my sight back and looked in the mirror, I’d be looking at my grandfather.

The world I live in is very ethereal. It’s like I’m caught between reality and some other world. In my photos, you’ll often see an x-ray effect that looks like bones. This is interesting, because it relates to my phantom sense: like an amputee who still feels a limb, I can see light coming from bones.

I prefer old cameras. They are larger, so I can write Braille all over them, and their parts click into position. Digital cameras often have a wheel to change modes without a beginning or an end, so I can’t tell where I am. And the technology moves so quickly. It might take me two years to learn to use the camera fully, and by then it’s already outdated. But there are good things about digital too. It means I can shoot completely by sound, just point and shoot. It’s very spontaneous, like sparring.

I made my bathroom into a darkroom, developing negatives under a 40-watt bulb. It’s what they were doing in the ’20s and ’30s, pretty crude and old-fashioned. Once I’ve done a contact sheet, I talk to friends and compare my memory of the event to what they’re seeing. From that I pick which photos I’ve been successful at and print them out large.

If I had any advice for young people, I would say what Joseph Campbell said: “follow your bliss”. I think if there’s something you really love, that you think about every minute of the day, at breakfast, when you’re sleeping, in the middle of the night, how can people compete with you?

Pete Eckert was talking to Naomi O’Leary. For more information, visit Pete’s website.

If you’re interested in photography, apply for a bursary to the Magnum Professional Practice seminar in Liverpool.