Amani Willett’s photobook journeys through chronic illness and ketamine therapy to reach his younger self

Early in Amani Willett’s life, he experienced several medical traumas that were near fatal. Amid new chronic health challenges in his adulthood, Amani turned to intensive therapies, where he encountered vivid memories of his younger self. In his new, deeply personal book Invisible Sun, the Tanzania-born photographer takes the viewer on a visual meditation through his survival and transformation, placing the reverberations of fragility onto every page.

Heavily influenced by ketamine therapy, which has been increasingly used to treat psychiatric conditions like depression since the early 2000s, Amani’s photography is shaped by the fractal, often psychedelic hallucinations he experienced during his journey toward his wounded younger self. “Each session was distinct, so it’s difficult to generalise, but certain visual motifs kept appearing,” shares Amani. “Sensations of falling through space, imperfect flowers struggling to bloom and shifting visions of darkness, light and the cosmos.”

The resulting images are staggeringly tender. Over 124 pages, Amani weaves experimental photography processes, dark landscapes and even AI-generated visions, capitalising on the often disquieting and eerie vibe of unreal images. “I used my own image archive to train an AI model, then fed it text from my journals to generate images that reflected those experiences,” says Amani. “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.”

Moving between the “haze of memory and the clarity of the present”, the photos depict swirling cloudscapes blown out in inverted whites, timelapsed ribbons of light in the night sky and whispery moments of sleep – in one photo, Amani observes his child’s dusky image through an iPad screen. “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,” says Amani.

Amani struggles to cite major creative inspirations, but that’s what makes this work so singular. It’s a complete act of turning inside out, an inversion as severe as the photo of birds so white against the black sky that they look like starling-shaped holes in the world. The book’s narrative mirrors Amani’s lived experience of touching death’s own vapour – in Invisible Sun, when the viewer sees a figure standing in a serene body of water, they also see Amani’s own metaphysical baptism, turning vapour to water, the unreal to the real, death to rebirth.

As the book nears its end, those same white birds flock the page until their whiteness devours the page – for Amani, it’s a moment where the story ruptures. “After that fade to white, there is an image of a newborn baby which I see as a metaphor for the new self I’ve become through the process of confronting and transforming my past experiences,” says Amani.

And thus, a transformation from child to adult meets its apex, leaving the quiet narrative up for interpretation. “Every viewer brings their own history to it and no two experiences are the same – the beauty of art lies in its multiplicity.” Blending ghostly black and white with blasts of overexposure, dreamlike colours and mazeworks of natural formations, Invisible Sun becomes a visual dictionary for every sensation that occurs throughout the often misunderstood therapeutic effects of ketamine – and how it feels to have a personal relationship with illness.

The book is now available to pre-order on Dust Collective.