I honestly thought “the mind’s eye” was a figure of speech. A metaphor. I thought “counting sheep” was just something people said in cartoons. When someone told me to “visualise a beach,” I assumed everyone was doing what I was doing: understanding the concept of a beach, knowing what one looks like, but staring at the inside of their eyelids.
I was not aware that when people close their eyes and “picture” something, they literally see a picture.
Not a metaphor. Not an abstract sense of knowing. An actual image. Some people see it in sharp detail. Some see it blurry. But they see something. A visual thing. On a screen that apparently exists behind their eyes.
I only stare at the darkness behind my eyelids.
The Red Rose
My realisation didn’t happen in a doctor’s office. It happened on a meditation app.
I was sitting quietly, following the instructor’s voice. They said:
“Imagine a red rose in full detail. The petals, the different hues of red. Really imagine it, like you can actually see it in front of your eyes. Like you can touch it.”
I sat there thinking: surely this is a joke. Nobody actually does that. You don’t see things when you imagine something. You grasp the concept. You have an understanding of it. But actually seeing a picture? No way.
So I ran my own poll. I asked family and friends. Could they do it?
Every single one of them said yes.
Everyone except me.
I described my experience to an AI, genuinely asking “what is wrong with me?” and it gave me the answer. I have aphantasia. It’s a condition where a person cannot voluntarily create mental images. About 2-5% of the population has it. Most of them, like me, don’t find out until someone asks the right question. The Code, Not the Graphics
When I try to visualise that rose, I don’t get a rendering. Instead of images, my brain runs on words, descriptions, and concepts. I don’t “see” a red rose. I process the data points: [Flower: Rose] + [Colour: Red] + [Texture: Petals].
It feels visual to me because it’s all I’ve ever known. But I now realise it’s more like reading the underlying HTML code of a webpage rather than seeing the finished website.
The Photographer’s Paradox
This has suddenly explained a frustration I’ve carried for my entire career.
For years, I’ve heard other photographers talk about “pre-visualising” their shots. They sit in a quiet room and build the entire image in their head. The lighting, the pose, the composition. All of it constructed before they pick up the camera. Ansel Adams built his whole philosophy around it. It’s practically gospel in photography education. I have always struggled with this. I could never force a picture to appear in the blank space behind my eyes. I assumed I just wasn’t trying hard enough, or that I lacked some creative muscle that other photographers had developed.
But there’s a positive flip side. Because I cannot generate an image internally, I am hyper-tuned to the reality externally.
I don’t arrive on set with a pre-conceived visual idea that I’m trying to force the world to match. I arrive with a blank slate. I am purely reactive to the physics of the light, the geometry of the space, and the genuine moments happening right in front of my lens.
My brain is building the whole stage in the dark. I can only see it once it’s “developed on film”.
Months in, I can tell you: knowing hasn’t changed how I shoot. I still work the same way I always have. But I understand it now. I’m not compensating for a weakness. I’m working with a different kind of strength. The awareness hasn’t altered my process, but it’s removed a frustration I carried for almost 30 years without understanding where it came from.
The Save Icon
This discovery also explains why I became a photographer in the first place.
My memory doesn’t work like a movie projector. I can’t close my eyes and re-watch a holiday from ten years ago. I remember the facts. Where we went, what we ate, who was there. But the sensory experience, the visual memory, is gone. My past is a library of books with no covers.
My photographs are not just art. They are my prosthetic memory. The shutter click is the save icon for my life. Since my brain doesn’t store JPEGs internally, I have to capture them physically if I want to hold onto the visual history of my own existence.
Every photo I’ve ever taken of my family, my kids, my travels, has a weight that I didn’t fully understand until now. Without the camera, those moments have no face. With it, I’m finally giving my memories something to look at.
When I told my family, it led to conversations we’d never had before. About how we each remember the same family moments differently. About why I photograph everything, compulsively, and always have. My kids had noticed it for years. Now we all understand why.
The Projector That Only Works at Night
Here’s the part that still bends my brain months later.
I dream visually. Or at least, I think I do. My dreams feel vivid, cinematic, full of imagery while they’re happening. During sleep, something is generating visual experience with no trouble at all.
But the moment I wake up, I’m back to my operating system. I have the recollection that the dream was visual. I know I saw things. But I can’t replay a single frame. The images are gone and all that’s left is a plot summary and no screenshots. This is probably why I hardly ever remember my dreams.
The neuroscience on this is genuinely unsettled. Most researchers frame aphantasia as a disruption of voluntary imagery, the top-down system you use when you consciously try to picture something. Dreams are involuntary, bottom-up, driven by spontaneous activity in the visual cortex during sleep. So the conventional explanation is that dreams bypass the broken system entirely: the visual cortex can fire on its own when the conscious mind isn’t trying to control it.
A 2020 study of 2,000 people with aphantasia found that around 63% reported visual dreaming, which supports this. But other researchers have pushed back. A study in Nature’s Scientific Reports found that people with aphantasia report fewer and “qualitatively impoverished” dreams compared to controls. Here’s my problem with that finding. Every dream vividness study I’ve seen is based on self-report after waking. They ask people with aphantasia to describe their dreams and compare those descriptions to people with typical imagery.
But the reporting happens after waking up. When I’m back to my non-visual operating system. I can’t replay the dream. I can’t hold onto the images. So of course my description sounds impoverished compared to someone who can close their eyes and re-render the dream while telling you about it.
The study isn’t measuring the dream. It’s measuring the recall of the dream. And if your recall system doesn’t do images, the dream will sound less vivid in the retelling even if it wasn’t less vivid in the experiencing.
I have a strong feeling that people with aphantasia experience dream imagery as vividly as anyone else. But we don’t know what to do with that visual information. We don’t have the waking infrastructure to hold it. By the time we’re conscious again, we’ve lost the crutch of mental imagery to replay what we saw, so the emotional attachment fades fast.
I can’t prove this. But I can tell you that when I’m in a dream, it doesn’t feel impoverished. It feels like the projector is finally switched on. And then someone pulls the plug.
The Machine That Thinks Like Me
Outside of photography, I’ve been building tools that use AI to help photographers work with their images. The starting point is always the same: a computational layer extracts structured facts from a photograph. Face geometry. Expression data. Pose landmarks. Object detection. It breaks an image down into data points before anything else happens.
The machine doesn’t “see” the photograph the way you do. It reads it as structured information and builds meaning from there.
[Face: detected] + [Expression: smiling] + [Eyes: open] + [Composition: rule of thirds]
Read that again. Now read how my brain handles the red rose:
[Flower: Rose] + [Colour: Red] + [Texture: Petals]
I’d been sensing this connection vaguely for weeks before it clicked into focus. I built a system that thinks the way I think. I just didn’t know it.
My entire career, I thought I was broken because I couldn’t pre-visualise like other photographers. Turns out, I was just running a different architecture. One that processes images as structured data, reacts to what’s actually there, and constructs meaning from observation rather than imagination.
That’s not a limitation. That’s a design pattern. And it turns out it’s the same one that powers large language models. They don’t “see” either. They process tokens, relationships, patterns. They construct meaning from structured data without ever rendering a picture in their heads. They’re running the same empty canvas that I am.
I’m still not sure what these tools will become. But when I look at what I’ve built so far, the way it observes and extracts and works from facts instead of pictures, I can see my own brain staring back at me.
The Garden
I’m not grieving this discovery. I’m fascinated by it. Months on, a lot of my life choices make sense in ways they never did before. The career. The obsessive archiving. The way I’ve always trusted what’s in front of me more than what’s in my head.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “Wait, I don’t see a rose either,” you are not alone. There is nothing wrong with you. You just run a different operating system. One that prioritises concepts over images.
And if you’re a creative like me, you might find that this “limitation” is actually a different kind of strength. The blank canvas isn’t empty. It’s just waiting for the light to hit it.
That is where the name comes from. I called this publication The Empty Canvas because that is what I have been working with my whole life. Not a blank page waiting for ideas. An actual empty canvas behind my eyes, the one I spent forty-nine years assuming everyone else had too. Everything I write here starts in the same place. A mind that cannot picture the thing, so it goes and stands in front of the real one instead.
I still can’t see the red rose. But I can tell you how it feels to stand in the garden and wait for the light to hit it.
Want to see Alex's work for yourself? He's a photographer and drone operator based in Sydney running Kess Media for government and infrastructure clients and building AI tools for photographers at Pixelfetch. This piece first appeared on his Substack where he publishes weekly essays on the gear, tools, and industry shifts that matter to working photographers. If you're a photographer or visual creative who works without visualization, we'd love to hear how you approach your craft. Share your experience in the comments.
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