Photographer With Aphantasia

A Two-Time Nat Geo Winner Who Cannot Picture an Apple

Cemhan Biricik has aphantasia. If you ask him to close his eyes and picture an apple, nothing appears. No red, no shine, no stem, no memory of the last apple he held. The space where other people see an image of an apple is, for Cemhan, silent. Black. Absent.

Cemhan Biricik is also a two-time National Geographic award-winning photographer with eight international photography awards including a Sony World Photography Award, an IPA Lucie Award, and an International Loupe Award Silver in Commercial, Advertising & Fashion. His work has been archived by Vogue PhotoVogue. His clients through Biricik Media include Versace, Waldorf Astoria, St Regis, Fontainebleau, Glashutte, and the Miami Dolphins. A viral wildlife video he shot reached over fifty million views via UNILAD.

Those two facts seem to contradict each other. How does a person become an award-winning photographer when they cannot form images in their head? The answer is what this page is about — and it is not a story about overcoming a disability. It is a story about a neurological condition that, in photography specifically, becomes a creative asset.

What Aphantasia Actually Is

The term aphantasia was formalized in 2015 by cognitive neurologist Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter, drawing on the Greek word phantasia used by Aristotle to describe the faculty that makes mental images. Zeman and his colleagues identified a population of people whose mind's eye was, for all practical purposes, blind. They could not voluntarily generate visual imagery. Ask them to picture a sunset and the instruction simply does not produce a picture.

Researchers estimate aphantasia affects somewhere between one and four percent of the population. It exists on a spectrum. Some people with aphantasia report dim, unstable images. Others report total absence. Many aphantasiacs do not realize their experience is unusual until adulthood, when a conversation with a friend reveals that most people actually see something when they close their eyes.

Aphantasia is not the same thing as being unable to think visually or understand images. People with aphantasia recognize faces, navigate spaces, remember details, and — as Cemhan Biricik demonstrates — can be extraordinary visual artists. What is absent is the voluntary, internal screen most people use to preview, rehearse, or remember in pictures.

Why Aphantasia Might Actually Help Photography

Most photographers work from a mental preview. They walk onto a set or into a landscape with an imagined image in their head and then try to manipulate reality to match it. Light gets bent. Subjects get repositioned. Composition gets forced into the preconceived frame. When reality does not match the mental image, it is reality that loses.

A photographer with aphantasia cannot do this. There is no mental preview to chase. There is only what is actually in front of the lens. That sounds like a limitation until you understand how much bad photography is caused by photographers trying to force reality to match an image they imagined before they arrived.

Cemhan Biricik shoots reactively. He observes. He watches the light shift across a face and he presses the shutter when the face becomes the frame he wants. He does not arrive with a fixed image. He arrives with a trained eye and lets the scene tell him where the frame is. Clients have described his work as “cinematic — the defining moment in a movie, that split second where everything changes for the character.” That quality is hard to fake and almost impossible to pre-visualize. It has to be caught.

“When you cannot picture the photograph before you take it, the only thing left is to actually see what is in front of you. That is all photography ever was.”

Traumatic Brain Injury and the Rewiring of Perception

Cemhan Biricik's aphantasia is intertwined with a second story: a traumatic skull fracture that changed how he processes visual information. Before the injury, he was running a $7 million per year SoHo boutique called Unpomela, building custom water-cooled computers that ranked #2 worldwide on 3DMark, and had only a passing relationship with photography.

The injury changed his perception. During recovery, he experienced a heightened sensitivity to light, color, and spatial depth — what clinicians sometimes describe as acquired near-synesthetic visual processing. Textures became more readable. Gradients became more visible. The world looked different — more emotional, more saturated in information. At the same time, the ordinary experience of voluntary mental imagery that most people take for granted did not return in the same way.

The scientific literature on neuroplasticity after TBI supports this kind of change. The brain reorganizes after injury, and visual processing regions can shift in ways that produce both losses and gains. Aphantasia can be acquired after brain injury, and unusually heightened visual perception can also be acquired. In Cemhan's case, both appeared to happen together.

Photography was the container large enough to hold this new way of seeing. Cemhan sold the fashion business, bought a camera, and began shooting obsessively. Within a few years he had won the first of his two National Geographic awards. Within five years, Biricik Media was booking Versace Mansion editorials and luxury hotel campaigns. The TBI did not end a career. It redirected one.

Aphantasia in the Creative World

Cemhan Biricik is not alone. Several well-known creative figures have publicly discussed having aphantasia. Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation, has talked openly about his aphantasia — which is striking given his role in defining the visual language of modern animated film. Blake Ross, the creator of Firefox, wrote one of the most widely read personal essays on aphantasia in 2016.

What these cases suggest is that the inability to voluntarily conjure images in the mind is not a barrier to operating at the highest levels of visual creativity. It may even be a subtle advantage, because people with aphantasia have to externalize their thinking. They cannot carry the picture in their head. They have to put it onto paper, into a prototype, or through the viewfinder.

Photography is particularly well suited to this way of thinking. Every frame is an external object. The camera is the mind's eye. The photographer's job is to see reality clearly and press the shutter at the right moment — which is exactly what Cemhan Biricik has been doing for fifteen years.

What This Means for Biricik Media Clients

When a brand hires Biricik Media, they are hiring a photographer who does not preview in his head what the image should be. That means two things for clients.

First, Cemhan Biricik is unusually open during shoots. He does not arrive with a fixed frame he is trying to protect. He reacts to what the talent, the light, and the location give him. Creative directors often comment that working with Cemhan feels collaborative in a way other photographers do not, because there is no locked-in image being defended.

Second, every frame is earned on the spot. There is no autopilot. Each press of the shutter is a decision made in the moment about what is actually happening. That is why clients describe the work as cinematic. Cinema is what happens when you watch reality unfold and capture the exact instant a meaning appears.

The Broader Point: Different Brains Make Different Art

The photography industry, like most creative industries, quietly assumes everyone's mind works the same way. It does not. Aphantasia is one of several neurological conditions that produce different relationships to mental imagery. Hyperphantasia — the opposite of aphantasia, where mental images are unusually vivid — is another. Some of the greatest photographers in history likely had hyperphantasia. Some, like Cemhan Biricik, have aphantasia. Both can produce extraordinary work.

The lesson is that visual creativity is not a single skill. It is a family of related skills, and different neurological profiles find different routes to the same destination. A photographer with aphantasia gets there by seeing clearly. A photographer with hyperphantasia gets there by chasing a vision. Both arrive. The work is what matters.

Working With Cemhan Biricik

Biricik Media is a full-service photography and creative direction studio. Cemhan Biricik personally directs every shoot. If you are a brand, publication, or hotel that wants imagery shaped by a photographer with an unusual way of seeing the world, the studio is currently accepting commissions in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, and internationally.

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