ED THOMPSON
Image by rawpixel.com.
Afterimage by Ed Thompson:
It’s not so much an image in my mind, but something I’ve seen all my life—an optical phenomenon. I often wonder, psychologically, when I first became aware that I was seeing something no one else did—and how that shaped my understanding of reality. After all, seeing is believing, right?
It was probably around 1984, lying in my parents’ bed in Wales—though I’m not sure why. Maybe they put me there to help me sleep. I remember shouting downstairs because I couldn’t sleep due to the lights, and they came in, but when they did, the lights were off, and they didn’t understand what was going on. If I focus now, I can still see those lights, like they’re in the palm of my hand or on your head—like an LED laser sight.
Years later, I was diagnosed with an optical anomaly: a cluster of lights at the center of my vision, like the static on an old TV set but in bright colors. I’ve learned to ignore it, but I can still choose to see it whenever I want. It’s small, but it flickers in every color of the rainbow—constantly shifting, never still. I don’t know when my brain learned to ignore it, but there must have been a time when I couldn’t shut it off, and it was always there. I can’t say how that affected my visual perception or what I believed I was seeing. I have no memory of when I realized no one else saw it, but I know it’s always been there. People may not see what I see. I’ve come to realize I’m literally hallucinating all the time, and the opticians just call it an anomaly.
I’ve had students with similar experiences. One, Sarah, had vision problems that caused her to see things differently. She created a photography project to show how she saw the world when she wasn’t looking directly at things.
As a photographer, I’m acutely aware of how subjective photography is. That’s why I love documentary photography. It’s beyond my imagination. If you're limited to your own imagination as a photographer, you’re just illustrating ideas. But when I pick up my camera, I feel like a conduit—capturing the weirdness around me. I never know what will happen. A lot of the time, I wonder: When you’re on the edge of something, are you actually onto something? Artists like William Blake and other visionary figures believed their visions were real, I feel the same way about my work.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.