Amateur Photographer ran a long interview with me in July. Amy Davies asked about the thing I rarely lead with: I cannot see pictures in my head.
The medical term is congenital aphantasia. I call it mind blindness, because that is easier to grasp. When I close my eyes and think of a beach, I see black. I have the abstract concept of a beach, but no picture. It affects one or two percent of people, and most of them have no idea, because how would you know it isn’t normal if you have lived with it your whole life. I found out five or six years ago, in the middle of a visualisation exercise with my wife, when she described seeing herself from the outside and I asked her what on earth she meant.
Every guide to landscape photography tells you to pre-visualise the shot. I have never once done that, because I cannot.
I don’t arrive at a scene with a pre-visualised image I am trying to recreate. I show up and absorb what is actually in front of me. In a way it helps, because it takes my ego and my preconceptions out of the process. I try to be a vessel: take the place in as it is, and bring it onto the photograph through my camera and the skills I have built over the years.
It also explains why I need the photographs in the first place. A print on my wall sends me straight back into the trip: the conditions, the people I travelled with, the moment the shot finally landed in the camera. Where there is no photograph, the place fades.
Read the full interview
We covered a lot more than the condition: how the empty landmarks actually happen, the research that goes into a trip, and what I am really after with this work.
I want to show these places as if time has stopped, in those moments before the cities wake up, and make people pause for a second and really appreciate the world we live in.
The full interview is on Amateur Photographer, with a set of the images we talked about: When you think of a beach what do you see? A rare condition means this photographer sees absolutely nothing.
Thanks to Amy Davies and the Amateur Photographer team for the space to talk about it properly.
