Tanzania-born photographer Amani Willett has released a deeply personal photobook titled "Invisible Sun" that documents his transformative journey through chronic illness and ketamine therapy. The 124-page visual meditation captures Willett's metaphysical voyage to reconnect with his younger self, following several near-fatal medical traumas he experienced early in life and ongoing chronic health challenges in adulthood.
The photobook is heavily influenced by Willett's experiences with ketamine therapy, an increasingly popular treatment for psychiatric conditions like depression since the early 2000s. During his therapeutic sessions, Willett encountered vivid memories and hallucinations that shaped his photographic approach. "Each session was distinct, so it's difficult to generalize, but certain visual motifs kept appearing," Willett explains. "Sensations of falling through space, imperfect flowers struggling to bloom and shifting visions of darkness, light and the cosmos."
The resulting images blend experimental photography processes with dark landscapes and AI-generated visions to create what critics describe as "staggeringly tender" artwork. Willett incorporated artificial intelligence into his creative process by training an AI model with his own image archive and feeding it text from his personal journals. "A handful of these AI-generated images appear in the book, but they felt essential – they gave visual form to something that had previously existed only in memory and language," he notes.
The photobook features striking imagery that moves between the haze of memory and present-day clarity. Readers encounter swirling cloudscapes blown out in inverted whites, time-lapsed ribbons of light against night skies, and intimate moments of sleep, including one photograph where Willett observes his child's image through an iPad screen. The visual narrative includes powerful metaphorical elements, such as birds so white against a black sky that they appear as starling-shaped holes in the world.
"It's about coming face to face with my younger self, allowing him to rest, and ultimately emerging as a new version of myself – imperfect, but transformed by the act of confronting and understanding these traumas," Willett describes. The book's structure mirrors his lived experience of confronting mortality, with images that transform from vapor to water, from the unreal to the real, representing a journey from death to rebirth.
The photobook builds to a climactic moment near its conclusion where white birds flood the page until their whiteness consumes everything – what Willett calls "a moment where the story ruptures." Following this fade to white, an image of a newborn baby appears, which he interprets as "a metaphor for the new self I've become through the process of confronting and transforming my past experiences."
Willett acknowledges that he struggles to cite major creative inspirations, which makes his work uniquely singular. The book serves as what critics describe as "a visual dictionary for every sensation that occurs throughout the often misunderstood therapeutic effects of ketamine" and explores what it means to maintain a personal relationship with illness. The photographer emphasizes that the work's interpretation remains open-ended, stating, "Every viewer brings their own history to it and no two experiences are the same – the beauty of art lies in its multiplicity."
"Invisible Sun" is now available for pre-order through Dust Collective, offering readers an unprecedented glimpse into the intersection of medical trauma, therapeutic healing, and artistic expression through the lens of contemporary photography.
