Harsh light doesn’t just make me squint. It dazzles me, unravels my thoughts, and leaves me overstimulated in a way that is difficult to explain unless you’ve lived inside a brain that processes sensory input like mine. When I walk into a space lit by artificial fluorescents, it’s not just a matter of preference or ambience. It becomes a full-body experience of discomfort. I can see the frequency of the light, like it’s buzzing visibly through the air. It pulses in my vision, makes my eyes blur, and drills into my skull with a rhythm that feels both visual and auditory. I can’t concentrate, can’t think, can’t work. Light, in those moments, becomes a barrier.

But that same hypersensitivity to light also forms the foundation of my photographic work. It’s given me an unusual fluency in its language. Where others see a lighting setup, I feel its temperature, its mood, its texture. When natural light falls across my desk in the morning, gentle, warm, and quiet, I feel it as a presence. It settles over me calmly, wrapping around my hands as I edit, encouraging a kind of safety that allows me to sink into focus. That kind of light doesn’t intrude. It holds. It soothes. And it’s those qualities I try to harness in my photography.

In my series Between, I explore this dynamic more deliberately: light becomes the narrator of emotional tension, intimacy, and restraint. Shadows are not just visual; they speak. The work holds space for presence that is quiet but cannot be ignored, a conversation between exposure and stillness, visibility and softness.

Because of how I process sensory input, certain lighting setups can feel disorienting or emotionally disconnected. I’ve found that overly flat or uniform lighting tends to strip away the nuance I’m looking for. The shadows disappear. The emotion feels distant. There’s a kind of clinical neutrality that doesn’t align with how I connect to the subject or the moment.

Instead, I’m drawn to directional natural light, or studio setups designed to mimic that same emotional softness. I’m thinking of approaches shared by photographers who use light and space to create intimate, grounded portraiture, like Jeanette Spicer in LensCulture’s feature on alternative intimacy in photography . I gravitate toward light that carves, that highlights texture, that casts shadows with intention. Light that lingers.

I don’t map my lighting beforehand with diagrams or fixed setups. My process is entirely intuitive. It’s about feeling my way through what the light is doing to the body in front of me. Is it caressing? Is it revealing? Is it interrogating? I can tell when something is off, even if I can’t always verbalise why. When it’s right, though, I feel it in my chest, a kind of silent click. Sometimes I describe it as if the light is singing on the subject. It’s a harmony between skin and shadow, between exposure and restraint.

That sensitivity has its limitations. I can’t shoot in clubs or busy night-time venues where flashing lights overload my senses. I’ve tried. It ends in headaches, nausea, a kind of fog that takes hours to clear. But it’s also a gift, because it sharpens my attention to what light can do emotionally.

I tend to photograph early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the sun is low and slanting. I like that time of day not just because of its visual qualities, but because of how it feels in my body. I often avoid golden hour, despite its popularity, because the warmth can skew the mood of the piece. It starts to editorialise the moment too much, and I prefer ambiguity.

What I love most about light is its ability to hold a conversation. Not with the camera, but with the subject. And not in a literal sense, but through what it reveals and conceals. There is a dialogue between highlight and shadow, one that I direct but do not dominate. Sometimes it’s a whisper, like a soft discussion that barely raises its voice. Other times, it’s a fight, a push and pull across skin, across surfaces. The lighting tells part of the story, and it tells it in a language I can feel in my bones.

Photography, for me, is how I take something that often overwhelms me and translate it into something beautiful, something intimate, something powerful. It’s a way to assert control over the very thing that destabilises me in daily life. My sensitivity becomes not just part of the work, but the reason the work exists. Light, as a subject and a collaborator, is never neutral in my images. It is emotional. It is tactile. And in each frame, it becomes a bridge between overstimulation and art. Between what hurts and what heals.