Photography Is My Mind's Eye
I was 16 when I first discovered that, maybe, not everyone's brain worked the same way. I was in our small little family home talking to my mum in the living room.
I don't really remember how the conversation started but I think I'd been telling her about a bad dream I'd had the previous night. She suggested I just change the dream. I looked at her blankly. What was she talking about? "What do you mean just change my dream?! We don't just decide dreams". Now she looked at me blankly. "Oh" she eventually said, "I do. I fly every night above the trees, I like flying".
I was stunned. Doing whatever you wanted in a dream? How cool! I had to find out more. I discovered it's called "lucid dreaming", when you're conscious you're dreaming and can make changes. I researched how to do it. I spent months trying - I never succeeded.
It was like finding out someone sees the blue tablecloth you have in a different shade of blue to what you see. You can understand the words but it's impossible to see the blue they see.
Moving forward about a year, I'm in year 12 and one of my elective classes was art. This was a pretty cool art class – we could choose any medium we wanted. Some students did pottery, many chose drawing or painting, some vinyl prints.
Me? I was stuck on what to do. None of these art styles sat with me. I couldn't make sense of them and felt overwhelmed. I didn't understand how someone could translate an idea to paper. How did they know what it looked like?
Eventually I settled on photography. My logic was: I can't draw or sculpt so why not use something that visually captures things for me? Then I don't have to make anything. All I'd have to do was learn some technical stuff like how to use shutter speed with ISO with aperture - which didn't feel overwhelming for me. It just felt kind of computer nerdy adjacent and I knew my way around a computer better than most of my peers.
In hindsight this was the second time I was in a situation where I'm starting to see not all brains work the same way but I didn't quite notice it at the time. I just thought I was cruddy at art.
I did well in that class, perfect score in fact. 2 of my images were chosen to be entered into a competition for high school art students across the NT. With 5 winners both of my images were chosen and as a prize hung in NT's Parliament House for a year.
I've experimented with different types of photography over the years. Landscapes, portraiture, still life, wildlife, abstract, street, events and so on. But without fail I always go back to nature & wildlife related photography. It calls to me and how I operate as a human being in more than one way.
Fast forward about 15 years – when I'm around 31 and have been with my wonderful partner for about 6 years. I don't remember the specific moment but throughout our relationship I learned that if I had read about something bad in the news (a car accident for example) I shouldn't describe or recount what I read (at least without fair warning) because my partner would "see it all play out" in her mind. For a long time I didn't realise she meant it literally.
Was my partner the anomaly or was I? Here I was again, bamboozled and realising just how different brains can be. Again I went on a research mission. I googled like mad. "What is a mind's eye", "what does the saying 'imagine an x' mean?", "do you see images when you close your eyes"?
Because, dear reader, I do not. When I close my eyes it's black (unless I put pressure on my eyes for funky colours and patterns). When I'm told to picture an item, I do not, can not. I thought that was a figure of speech.
In my Google frenzy I discovered aphantasia (link). As I read in disbelief all these threads of my life started to suddenly come together. I'd had all these puzzle pieces of experiences that never fit together and now I was discovering aphantasia they all suddenly sprung together like magnets.
Before I get too ahead of myself, aphantasia is a condition that, it's estimated about 1 in 25 people experience. It's the lack or significant impairment of mental imagery. Like with almost anything it's on a bit of a spectrum and it would seem I'm far down the end where I have absolutely no mind's eye whatsoever.
Choosing photography in my year 12 art class wasn't exclusively a lack of drawing skill or willingness to learn. I was impeded by the fact I can not picture anything in my mind. Having an idea is one thing but trying to translate it to imagery when I'm unable to even vaguely imagine what that might look like, well, it was just too big of a task, too overwhelming. So I chose something that can display my ideas to me almost immediately.
I remember the relief I experienced when learning about aphantasia. So many little things that just didn’t have to be stressful any more were suddenly gone. I wasn’t bad at these things, I just literally can’t do them.
No more feeling stressed listening to a visually guided meditation because I’m in overdrive trying to form a mental image of something calm. No more awkwardly closing my eyes and staring into the black while being told to “see” something.
No more kicking myself about bad biographical memory. It’s just that my memories are very strongly connected to big emotions. If I want to remember the smaller less emotionally charged moments, it’s best I photograph them.
Which leads me to photography and now. Photography is not just a career or art form I like, it's part of me. It's almost a stand in for my "mind's eye".
Having aphantasia drives me to photograph things or moments in nature others might not get to see for themselves. That desire has grown from my own desire to be able to experience what having a “mind’s eye” would be like.
Aphantasia also makes my style of photography (and life) extremely in the moment. I very rarely plan photos - I can't imagine how a scene might look and then try to recreate it. I just go out with the camera and look in real time. Sure, I'll plan to go out at times the lighting is nice or perhaps I'll have a target in mind (macro, landscape, wildlife) but beyond that, no planning.
To be perfectly honest I usually pack my entire kit whenever I'm out for a shoot. What if I see a really cool bug and need my macro kit? What if the sunset is spectacular and I need my wide angle? What if – you get the picture (pardon the pun, it was accidental but I’m keeping it).
Since finding out I have aphantasia, my photography has greatly improved. I've spent more time out in the field, leaning into the lack of planning and seeing it as an asset rather than a limitation. Instead of getting frustrated at the level of research it would take to pre-plan a scene I'd conceptually put together, I just... go out and see what's there.
See “How a Visual Artist With Aphantasia Drew What She Couldn’t “See”” for a really good breakdown of how someone with aphantasia might try to create an image. I related to it a lot.
So next time you say 'picture this' or 'imagine you can see,' remember that some of us don't know that's literally possible - and realising it is can be a glimpse into a completely different way of experiencing the world.
If you have questions about aphantasia or want to share your own experiences, I'd love to hear from you in the comments below!
