We all have different interests in life, artistic or otherwise, but how well do you understand why or how that is? Given the example of photography or another art form, do you know what draw you to the genre that demands your focus?

I think that any creative work, at least one that you care about personally, (not a project just because you have been made to do a project) is a reflection of yourself in some capacity. So if you think hard enough about what you are working on, it’s not usually too difficult to make some sort of link; ”I’m a social person so I was drawn to portraiture, I’m into planes so I wanted to paint planes.”
But this mostly refers to the subject, what about the reason you reason for your style of work, the reason you chose to make something or present something in the way that you did?

I started making images around 11 years ago, and have gravitated toward shooting shape and form in the environment, lighting, with a distinct lack of people in shot. There is still a subset of person-as-a-subject photography that I enjoy, but usually only with the person obscured or abstracted in some way. Part of my draw to these types of works may have come down to awkwardness, that I would rather not have someone think I’ve taken a photograph of them - but I think there’s more to it than that. 

I recently learned that I may have aphantasia - the inability to form mental imagery. I have gone through a somewhat lengthy period of denial that started off with “yeah, but you don’t really see the images in your head do you, you just sort of feel them?” but ended with me realising that most people can in fact visualise colour, or enough detail to see a known face in their mind. Aphantasia seems to exist on a spectrum, and perhaps I can ‘see’ some level of image in my mind, but nothing close to the amount of detail needed to resolve a face, and with a complete absence of colour. Even then, it’s hard for me to call it a visual, it’s more as though I am feeling object locations and movements within a space. Below is a photograph, and the closest example of what I can feel if I was to think about it in my head - but again, there is no picture at all really, not even a black and white one. This is just the closest thing I could come up with to visually show my experience.

Despite nothing actually changing, living with the knowledge that others can experience vivid mental imagery while mine is so lacklustre is crushing. The pain is not just that the experience is worse, but that most others cannot relate to me, nor can I them. I started a tangent here about shared experiences but then deleted it, because it’s enough for its own entire bit.

It didn’t take very long for me to start considering what aphantasia meant to art, and particularly mine - out of grief, anger, and frustration, I wanted to know how to share the experience, and to understand how and why someone that can’t visualise came away with an art degree. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense. 

I could never really get good at other forms of art like drawing or working with paints. I could draw by copying a reference, but not very well if it was out of nothing. I remember trying to draw bicycles as a child and realising that I couldn’t, I just had no idea what the frame looked like and how it connected up, despite riding one all the time. Outside of copying something to paper from a reference, drawing and painting require either visualisation, or trial and error (just keep rubbing out the line and redrawing it randomly until it looks correct!). To transform a scene into a painting of almost any style, it’s really going to help if you can imagine what it looks like beforehand, and that’s something I cannot do.

Photography, by comparison, often does not require any visualisation at all. It certainly can, especially when considering more constructed images (think J. Wall or G. Crewdson), and I think visualising can play a key role in being an adept at lighting a studio or scene, something which I am not. A large sect of photography is focused on documentary however, where rather than being generative or highly transformative, the work is based on capturing reality and re-contextualising it. The skills required are no longer to bring something into existence, but rather to analyse what already exists, something you can currently see with your own eyes. The skill is to notice, to critique, to cull the environment into the image you want to create. Documentary photography almost allows you to work backwards, not forwards. That offers an initial explanation as to why I may have been drawn to photography in the first place - I’ve always turned to creative medium in order to try and get my point across, but having the world in front of me provides the part I cannot create myself, I just need to narrow it down to say what I’m trying to say.

That covers why photography, but not how or what I shoot. When trying to consider how I might portray aphantasia through photography, it dawned on me just how close the work I shoot already is to the way I experience the world in my mind. Scenes or memories in my head are mostly based on the location or distinctive features, which mostly ends up being large structural shapes, or contrasting edges like walls of buildings, for example where a wall meets the sky or ground. Thinking about my work, it’s dominated by lines, and where it may not seem it visually, it was lines in my head that dictated the way I chose to frame the scene. They can be edges of trees, buildings, pavements, or literal lines of paint, but my shape-centric way of thinking is always present, either in decision making or final image.

When it comes to non-landscape work with a people or object focus, this too has an uncanny resemblance to the way I see the world in my head. I’ve never been particularly drawn to shooting people, but when I came across Hiro Matsuoka’s (not the producer of the Pikachu movie) work The Undescribed Dance a number of years ago, the visual inspiration stuck to me like glue. I have since had an itch for capturing portraits or self portraits using obscurity, and trying to capture the essence of life in motion. While I attribute the inspiration to Hiro, I can’t deny that this bares a resemblance to what memories are like to me. I’m not able to conjure a mental image of someone’s face or details of their body or clothes, my memory contains an imprint of where their body was positioned, and a sort of echo of how they moved. 

I’ll never know for sure how much my unique internal experience has subconsciously guided my work in a certain direction, and I won’t deny there could be a little hindsight bias going on here. But to me there is joy in finding links in art, even if there’s a risk they are strenuous or imagined. All this is to say, maybe it’s worth trying to think about exactly why you are interested in doing what you are doing. You have a reason for everything, even if you aren’t aware of it. It may not provide any benefit, may take a long time and never provide a clear answer, but the act of exploring your rationale could drive you forwards to create. The discovery I’ve made about myself is not a positive one, but has given me a frustration that I feel like I need to make something to get rid of.