1. What does your creative ritual look like? Do you have specific habits or conditions that spark your creativity?
First, I need to make clear that I don’t consider myself an artist and I don’t think of creativity as something specifically linked to artistic endeavours. For me creativity is the process through which ideas are connected in new ways and it applies to every day life, to work, to scientific research, and to art.
I don’t have a creative ritual in the way people think about it. I don’t have a morning practice, I don’t have a dedicated space, I don’t light candles or put on specific music, I don’t have any ritual that triggers some creative state per se.
If anything, the closest to a process I have is to have the opposite of a process. It’s the absence of any of those things that helps me allow ideas emerge in my brain. In other words, the conditions that get me ideas is the absence of conditions and having stopped trying to think about what I want.
There’s a neurological basis for this. Neuroscientists at the University of Utah led by Shofty published a study in the journal Brain in 2024 using stereo-electroencephalography, electrodes placed directly into the brain, to record what happens during creative thinking (Bartoli, Devara, Dang, et al., 2024). They found that the Default Mode Network (DMN), a set of brain regions including the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus, becomes highly active when people aren’t focused on external tasks. This network processes information from across the brain, making connections that directed attention networks can’t make. The DMN drives what they call spontaneous cognition: any thought that doesn’t constitute a direct response to something in the immediate environment.
In other words, they have shown that not thinking about things is in fact a highly active state of the brain, not passive resting state as you’d expect. When you sit on a train with nothing to do looking out the window, your brain’s not idle. It’s connecting things you’ve already absorbed, making links between a conversation you had last week about composition and a technical problem you’ve been having with a particular image, or connecting random ideas in an unexpected way. The only ritual is getting out of its way.
There’s also an important temporal dimension. A 2019 study by Basu, Duvall, and Kaplan in Environment and Behavior expanded on Attention Restoration Theory, originally developed by Stephen Kaplan in the 1990s. The central idea is the concept of soft fascination: effortless attention on gentle stimuli, like watching landscape move past a train window or leaves moving in a breeze. What my wife calls “staring mode”. This state allows the brain’s attentional resources to recover from what Kaplan called Directed Attention Fatigue. The four components of a restorative environment are being away, extent (enough scope to occupy the mind without demanding focus), compatibility, and soft fascination. A train journey ticks all four boxes.
In addition, to me, what helps the appearance of that state is to let your brain get tired. When it’s tired, it can’t process all the conscious information that surrounds you, all the stimuli that your senses receive. So it cuts out non essential monitoring and pays no attention to what’s around you. In that state of tiredness, DMN appears faster and more effectively than when you just hope things will happen.
Mental fatigue accelerates DMN emergence through a specific neural mechanism: maintaining focused attention requires the salience network to actively suppress the DMN. When cognitive resources are depleted by prolonged effort, that suppression fails, and the DMN emerges faster and more reliably than it would if you were simply waiting for it to happen while well-rested.
This is directly supported by research. For example the resource-control model of sustained attention, formalised in a 2018 review in Engineering (Qi et al., 2018). The model proposes that sustained attention depletes executive resources in the salience network. Specifically the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex. These regions are the switching mechanism between the Default Mode Network and the task-positive networks. Their job when you’re focused is to keep the DMN suppressed.
When those resources run low, the suppression fails. The DMN activates not because you wanted it, but because the brain can no longer afford the energy cost of controlling it. One neuroscience article describes this as follows: “When you hit your limit, the default mode network doesn’t activate because you’re weak-willed or distracted. It activates because continued suppression of that network would damage your cognitive performance, not enhance it.”
This mechanism offers an alternative, more efficient route toward DMN. If you deliberately exhaust your focused attention first, for example by working hard on a problem, engaging in demanding analysis, depleting the resources of the salience network, the DMN will emerge more quickly when you stop, because the system that normally suppresses it is too tired to keep it in check. You don’t have to wait for the DMN to decide to show up. You can exhaust the opposition to free it.
So, the answer is therefore that I don’t have a ritual. I have a set of conditions I can create: remove external stimulation, tire my attentive brain, wait, and trust that something will surface.
2. When you’re feeling creatively blocked, what’s your go-to method for breaking through?
I close the laptop and walk away. I learned when I was a kid that forcing your brain to solve a problem usually hits a wall and is an inefficient way to reach a solution. It’s a bit like trying to force a cat to eat food it doesn’t want.
I see my brain as a multitasking system that can compartment several tasks and work simultaneously on all of them semi-consciously. I think this comes in part from playing music: to play the organ, I had to learn to decouple my fingers, hands, and feet, and control them individually but simultaneously. Then to play, I’d assign tasks to each with only a light layer of conscious coordination (in fact, often thinking about what I was playing would distract me enough to get me lost and make me fail playing like a house of cards collapsing).
To solve a problem, as for finding a creative solution, I’d usually first study the subject (the problem, the literature, other people’s work) as much as I can to understand what I’m looking at. Then I’d file it and consciously forget about it. I wouldn’t force it, I wouldn’t try to get to where I wanted to be. Eventually, a solution or an idea would appear.
I’ve always worked like that. In real life, in my research, in my professional life, in my hobbies, in my writing. Let me give you some examples: one day last year, my wife had blocked a drawer in the kitchen. She had tried to unblock it, but had made things worse and she was then considering destroying the drawer to get its contents out. I stopped her in time, but I didn’t have a solution, which annoyed her because she wanted the problem resolved immediately. I told her to wait a while and I’d think about it. In the absence of obvious solution, I filed the problem in my brain and let it mature over a couple of nights. The second morning, an idea appeared to me and I was sure it was the right one: running simulations in my head with all the information I had told me that it would work. And it did. Problem solved.
Here is another example: when I was doing research at the university, I sometimes would have a hunch that there was something potentially useful somewhere in an area I had looked into. But I couldn’t really grasp a real thing, it would remain out of reach of my conscious mind. So, I’d file it in my brain, then let is simmer for a few days. I’d suddenly wake up in the middle of the night with the certainty that I had reached something and it would emerge up to my conscious mind. I’d need to write the idea immediately or I’d lose it. I’d go into a feverish writing mode where I would write a 10 page paper in a couple of hours in one go. Some of these papers were published.
Similarly, in my craft hobbies (e.g. writing, photography), I often get my ideas by not thinking about them. I let my brain go blank and I refuse to direct it in any direction. On the train for example, I can sit looking at nothing in particular for hours, letting my mind wander freely, exploring ideas, making strange connections. Most of my Substack post ideas came that way.
This phenomenon is called incubation, and it was first formally described by Graham Wallas in his 1926 book The Art of Thought. Wallas proposed a four-stage model of the creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination, verification. The preparation stage is active: you research, you study, you fill your mind with the raw material of the problem. The incubation stage is where you leave the problem alone and stop trying. The conscious mind disengages and unconscious processes take over. Illumination is simply the moment the result surfaces to your conscious mind, what people call the aha moment or the shower thought. Verification is the task of testing whether the result is any good.
The critical idea is that incubation is where the generative work actually happens. Counter intuitively, it’s not when you scroll through IG, watch YT videos, or read someone’s magical solution to the problem. The other three stages are necessary scaffolding, but the connection-making occurs during the period of not trying.
A 2009 meta-analysis by Sio and Ormerod published in Psychological Bulletin reviewed decades of incubation studies covering thousands of participants and confirmed that incubation significantly enhances problem-solving (Sio & Ormerod, 2009, Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94-120). The effect was strongest when people had already spent time trying to solve the problem and gotten stuck. In fact, the hardest you consciously tried to solve the problem and created mental fixation, the more incubation helps. The break isn’t a rest, it was a sudden release from dead end.
That release after a period of obsession was studied more specifically in 2025. The study, published in Nature Communications Biology, examined dynamic switching between the Default Mode Network and the Executive Control Network, i.e. the switching between unconscious thinking and conscious problem solving. The researchers found that people who are better at switching between focused task mode and the resting state score higher on measures of divergent thinking, i.e. creativity. Thy showed that it’s not about staying in the DMN forever, it’s about being able to enter it when needed.
I learned when I was a kid that the feeling of being blocked is a signal, not a problem. I didn’t understand the mechanism and I couldn’t put a name on it. The urge to push harder, to consume more content, to seek external solutions is the instinct to fight the block, and fighting it makes it worse. I’ve learned to recognise the feeling and act on it: close the laptop, leave the room, go outside. The solution will be there when I come back.
3. Describe a moment when your creative perspective shifted dramatically. What triggered it?
It happened suddenly, without warning last year. One day I was out making the kind of photographs I had done for 20 years: landscapes with nice colours, sunrises over the sea, the whole aesthetic package. At a push some street photography, but I’m still struggling with the relationship to the other. And it dawned on me that none of it mattered. The whole process and the resulting object were utterly futile.
Pretty images, nice colours, sunrises, these are things you can argue offer pleasant moments. I liked taking them, I liked looking at them. They make people happy for a few seconds as they scroll past. But they aren’t self-justifying. A photograph of a sunrise can only justify itself by being pleasant to look at, but that’s a thin justification. It’s of no importance in the grand scheme of things and will have no value to me in 20 years’ time.
Documentary photography is different. It can support its own weight because it increases knowledge and it contains its own reason to exist. It creates something bigger than itself. A documentary photograph of a fishing village that’s dying, of a housing estate about to be demolished, of a community that won’t exist in five years, that photograph is evidence. It says this was here, that this happened, and that these people lived. In 20 years’ time, it will have the exact same value, if not more. You can’t say the same of a sunset.
The realisation hit me suddenly, as if it had been maturing in my unconscious mind for months without my knowledge. It was clearly the result of the unconscious incubation that Wallas describes.
Dorothea Lange, who created our vision of the Great Depression grimness, described it this way: “A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph per se. It is a photograph which carries the full meaning and significance of the episode”. “Carries the full meaning and significance”, is exactly what landscape photography can’t offer. Unlike landscape photography, the documentary image means something beyond itself. It creates a sort of accountability to the world it shows.
Lewis Hine, whose photographs of child labour in the early twentieth century directly led to labour law reform, described it even more simply: “there are two things I wanted to do”, he said. “I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated”. That puts the photograph as an instrument of knowledge and conscience.
I wrote about this realisation under the title “Pretty Images Are Dead. Long Live Documentary Photography”. The trigger was generative AI and the many discussions around it. The moment AI could create a perfect sunset from a guy’s prompt from his bedroom, the entire idea of decorative landscape photography collapsed. If a machine can generate convincing variations of pretty, then the only thing that still holds value is the photograph that required presence, witness, and the decision to be there. AI can simulate what you see, it can reproduce anything you might capture in your photographs, but it can’t simulate your conscious decision to look. It can’t decide what story needs to be told.
During my writing for this post, I discovered that the Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin, who took the Tiananmen Square “Tank Man” photograph, went through a similar realisation before me. He had been struggling with whether landscape photographs were simply “quotations” from surroundings. Then, as he describes it in the afterword to his photobook Narcissus, “I suddenly understood that I was documenting an experience of place rather than a merely scenic view”. That distinction, between scenic and experiential, between decorative and evidentiary, is exactly what downed on me independently.
That evolution creates a paradox: documentary photography seems to go against the very idea of creativity (I’m coming back to the question, be patient!). If what you take is what you’re witnessing, if your job is to record rather than invent, where is the creative input? Where is the making? Intuitively, it feels like you’ve removed yourself from the equation and you reduced the photographer to a pair of eyes with a shutter button. But in reality, the meaning of creativity changes, not the need for it. Instead of trying to solve the problem “how can I make this place look nice”, your creativity now tries to solve the problem “how can I convey this feeling, this situation, this event”. That’s a much harder problem. It requires decisions about framing, about what to include and what to leave out, about the single moment that carries the weight of everything else. It requires a different kind of seeing, one that is accountable to the world rather than to aesthetic standards. The creativity doesn’t disappear. It moves from the decorative to the communicative.
I now think of photography in terms of projects and accounting for the world around me. That documentary photography is the only photography that can carry its own weight and justification because it increases knowledge and creates something bigger than itself. Everything else is decoration, and decoration has no defence against the machine. Even when I simply walk in the streets of Paris and take photographs of people going at their daily activity, I connect images together and think of the message they convey. That’s my new creative process: what do things mean, how can I help others understand it.
4. What recurring themes or elements do you find yourself naturally drawn to capture?
The recurring themes in my photography have changed over time, as you can expect from the evolution of what my understanding of what photography is and its place in the world.
Originally, when I was interested in landscape photography (which really meant mainly seascape photography), I would look for what pleased me aesthetically because photos for me were things to look at and get a nice feeling. The main themes were:
- The sea, waves, beach.
- Rocks in the sea with long exposures.
- Sunrises.
When I understood that photography should be about evidence, experience, presence, and aestheticism should serve the message rather than being the whole point, then the themes became:
- People and their activities.
- Time, its passing, and effect.
- What happens int he world.
Now I’m more thinking about photography in terms of projects. A lot of these revolve around capturing people’s life, family, and memory.
5. What non-photographic influences (books, music, films, etc.) most impact your work?
I have fairly few external influence today. When I started, the great landscape photographers (e.g. Ansel Adams, Colin Prior who was a local to me) were a major source of my understanding and I wanted to emulate them.
Now I’m in awe in front of war photographers, especially women who encounter additional barriers (e.g. Dickey Chapelle, Jackie Spinner, Lynsey Addario, Anja Niedringhaus, to name a few), who risk their lives to show events that most of the world doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know about. But they’re not an influence on me since I don’t have half of their courage and I won’t try to emulate them.
My way of thinking, influenced by a part of autism, means that different areas of life don’t mix for me. I don’t understand how books, films, or music could influence my photography. To me they are very different domains that don’t cross-polinate.
Sources and related research:
- Bartoli, E., Devara, E., Dang, H.Q., Rabinovich, R., Mathura, R.K., Anand, A., Pascuzzi, B.R., Adkinson, J., Kenett, Y.N., Bijanki, K.R., Sheth, S.A., & Shofty, B. (2024). Default mode network electrophysiological dynamics and causal role in creative thinking. Brain, 147(10), 3409-3425.
- Basu, A., Duvall, J., & Kaplan, R. (2019). Attention Restoration Theory: Exploring the role of soft fascination and mental bandwidth. Environment and Behavior, 51(9-10), 1055-1081.
- Eastwood, J., & Danckert, J. (2020). Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom. Harvard University Press.
- Elpidorou, A. (2018). Propelled: How Boredom, Frustration, and Anticipation Lead Us to the Good Life. Oxford University Press.
- Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169-182.
- Mann, S., & Cadman, R. (2014). Does being bored make us more creative? Creativity Research Journal, 26(2), 165-173.
- Sio, U.N., & Ormerod, T.C. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94-120.
- Wallas, G. (1926). The Art of Thought. Harcourt Brace.
- Qi, P., Ru, H., Gao, L., Zhang, X., Zhou, T., Tian, Y., … & Ming, D. (2018). Neural mechanisms of mental fatigue revisited: New insights from the brain connectome. Engineering, 5(2), 276-286.
- DeCaro, M.S., & Van Stockum, C.A. (2018). Ego depletion improves insight. Thinking and Reasoning, 24(3), 315-343.
- Menon, V. (2023). 20 years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis. Neuron.
- Bartoli, E., et al. (2024). Default mode network electrophysiological dynamics and causal role in creative thinking. Brain, 147(10), 3409-3425.
- Seeley, W.W., et al. (2007). Dissociable intrinsic connectivity networks for salience processing and executive control. Journal of Neuroscience, 27(9), 2349-2356. (The original salience network paper — foundational for the seesaw model.)
- Wieth, M.B., & Zacks, R.T. (2011). Time of day effects on problem solving: When the non-optimal time is optimal. Thinking & Reasoning, 17(4), 387-401. (Related: people solve insight problems better when they’re slightly tired because cognitive control is reduced.)
- Dorothea Lange, quoted in Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
- Lewis Hine, quoted in Photography Project (photographyproject.uk/research/lewis-hine-quotes) and Hyperallergic, “Photographer as Advocate: Lewis Hine’s America”
- Stuart Franklin, “This Machine Called the Camera,” Guernica Magazine, and the afterword to Narcissus (his photobook on Otrøya, Norway)
- “Pretty Images Are Dead. Long Live Documentary Photography” (Photoni.st, 22 August 2025)
- “Street Photography Makes Me Uncomfortable mk2” (Photoni.st, 03 April 2026)
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