A couple of years ago I discovered something astonishing. Most people can close their eyes and see images, real or imagined, at will. Actual images, like they see through their eyes.
This seems like witchcraft to me. I close my eyes and all I see is the back of my eyelids, black, with maybe some visual effects caused by the lighting in the room I’m in. I mentioned this to friends and most were equally astonished that I couldn’t form mental images and wondered how I could possibly go through life without this ability.
It is a condition (though I hesitate to call it that) known as aphantasia, a name deriving from Aristotle’s description of the mind’s eye as “phantasia”, and one I first came across when a nascent scientific study on the subject was reported on the news. Before this I’d assumed that the mind’s eye was merely a metaphor to describe visual memory – surely people don’t actually “see” things in their minds – that would be crazy. It appears that about 2% of the population experiences this lack of mental imagery, though most people are on a spectrum, able to visualise with varying levels of “vividness” ranging from “just like being there” to “black”.
It’s a very difficult thing to explain because being unable to visualise doesn’t necessarily imply a lack of visual memory. For example I can describe my house, I can mentally walk through the rooms and reproduce the layout from memory. But I can’t say that I “see” what I’m describing, at least not anything close to what I can see with my eyes open. Ask me to visualise an elephant for example, and I can concentrate on parts of the elephant and mentally move from one part to another (think, perhaps, of sketching with disappearing ink), but ask me to visualise an elephant at a watering hole surrounded by trees and my brain just goes blank. At best I can perhaps see something vague and blurry but as soon as I try to get into the details, the image fades.
So how does this affect my photography? Well, it turns out, quite a lot. Reading photography books, most of them have phrases like “visualise how you would like the final print to appear”, “pre-visualise the final photograph”. Ok. Assume I can’t do that. What now? For most photographers this step appears to be a vital prerequisite to their craft.
My photography consists largely of walking around looking for things to photograph. Once I’ve found something, it’s often hard to know how to improve it without the ability to pre-visualise the effect of, say, changing lens. I’m attracted to strong geometric compositions (because they are simpler to work with) and a lot of my photographs are just happy accidents, many of which I discover during the review and editing process. But it also means that I have trouble knowing what will work when on location and results in a lot of fruitless expeditions with my camera.
So my question is, does anyone else have a similar experience? How does this effect your photography? Do you have any methods to help you to get a better “hit rate” that don’t rely on visualisation?