I've always known that I'm a visual person.
I just didn't realise how much it shaped the way I experience the world.
I've always been fascinated by NLP — Neuro-Linguistic Programming — and over the years I've read about it, studied it, and tried to bring some of its principles into the way I communicate and understand people.
One of the ideas that stayed with me is the concept of representational systems: the way we internally experience the world through what we see, what we hear and what we feel — visual, auditory and kinesthetic.
I don't believe we fit neatly into boxes, and science doesn't support the idea that each of us belongs to one fixed “type.”
But as a way of observing my own experience, it has always made extraordinary sense to me.
Because I know where my mind goes first.
I see.
If you ask me about a holiday season from years ago, I can probably tell you what I was wearing.
I can see the dress.
The colour.
The restaurant.
Where I was sitting.
The light in the room.
I may even remember the person sitting opposite me and the shape of the glass on the table.
But ask me what music was playing?
Nothing.
Completely gone.
This happens to me constantly.
I remember my life in images.
And I think in images too.
Maybe that's also why I speak so fast.
When I'm explaining something, I'm often not constructing the sentence word by word. The scene already exists in my head.
I'm watching it.
The people are there.
The clothes are there.
The location is there.
Sometimes even the light is there.
I'm simply trying to describe the film quickly enough.
And language is slower than the image.
I've often wondered whether this is part of the reason I became a photographer.
Long before I press the shutter, I tend to see something.
Not necessarily the finished photograph. Sometimes it's only a gesture, a colour, a strange relationship between a person and a space. But there is already an image somewhere in my mind, and photography becomes the process of getting closer to it.
Creative direction works in much the same way for me.
So does film.
A scene can begin with something incredibly small: the way a woman walks into a room, the movement of a dress, a face seen through glass, a particular quality of afternoon light.
And then a world begins to form around it.
Perhaps this is what visual thinking means in my own life.
It isn't simply that I like beautiful images, or that I notice colours and compositions.
It's that images often seem to arrive before language.
The words come afterwards.
For most of my career, translating those images into reality meant finding the right model, clothes, location, lens, light, collaborators and moment.
Today, the tools available to image-makers have expanded enormously. Photography, cinema, digital manipulation and generative technologies can all become different ways of translating an internal image into something another person can see.
And perhaps that's why I've never been particularly interested in technology for its own sake.
The tool comes after the vision.
A camera doesn't decide what I want to see.
Neither does a computer.
The interesting part happens earlier, in that strange private space where an image begins to exist before it exists anywhere else.
Rudolf Arnheim spent much of his work challenging the idea that seeing and thinking are entirely separate activities. His writing on visual thinking has always fascinated me for precisely that reason: perhaps perception isn't simply something that happens before thought. Perhaps it can be part of thought itself.
I recognise something of myself in that idea.
Because when I'm imagining a photograph or directing a film, I don't always feel that I'm thinking about an image.
I feel that I'm thinking inside one.
Maybe that's what being a visual person means to me.
The image arrives before the words.
I see.
I am a visual person.
