Insomnia is like entering a surreal endless dimension in which everything is slightly distorted, either too bright or too dark and just suffocating. You become hyper sensitive to everything, sounds, light, feelings in your mind and body. It’s a state of heightened awareness, and not in a good way. However, it is a state that many creatives claim to do their best work in, the state in which creative genius strikes. As a sufferer of chronic insomnia, I wanted to explore this condition and state of being and how it impacts my creativity further.

This photo series is a documentation of the harsh, lonely, hyper-focused and yet distorted view of the world when existing and exploring in the night-time and lacking much needed sleep. I chose to have black and white images in order to achieve the high contrast, duality of seeing either end of the spectrum to the highest level at night; lights are at their brightest, and the darkness is at its most intense and all-encompassing. They are close-up shots, with hard to distinguish subjects to communicate the hyper focus and also the lack of clarity that occurs when going without sleep. The focus is around the highlights of light that penetrate the sometimes seemingly endless black and their relationship. The details in the captivating textures and refections that the eye is bombarded with and fixated on in the darkness are the key features, as opposed to the ‘zoomed out’ complete view of reality. Overall, I feel this publication and series of images convey the experience and feeling that I wanted to, the heightened senses and loneliness of night-time can be haunting yet beautiful.