My Doorway into Eco-Sensory Photography That Helped Reweave the Boundary Between Self and Landscape

I first came across David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous during a period when my emerging photographic practice was undergoing a period of rapid development. I had already begun to experience how photographing in nature, through a therapeutic photography programme, helped support mental health recovery following my breakdown three years ago.

The book’s exploration of sensory perception and its role in ‘human-environment’ interactions resonated with me. It offered deep insights into how I could practice eco-sensory photography to bridge the divide between inner psychological and external physical landscapes. This felt legitimising to the conceptual narratives that lay within my existing work during this fledgling period of artistic expression.

In his book Abram recalls the aftermath of a hurricane in 1985:

"The breakdown of our technologies had forced a return to our senses, and hence to the natural landscape in which those senses are so profoundly embedded. We suddenly found ourselves inhabiting a sensuous world that had been waiting, for years, at the very fringe of our awareness, an intimate terrain infused by birdsong, salt spray, and the light of the stars."

Reading of his formative experience underscored for me that sensory awareness can be heightened by disconnecting from technology, allowing for a more intimate engagement with the natural world. Abram’s idea, that we are sensorially and spiritually impoverished by our increasing reliance on technology, must surely resonate all the more now, being forty years of digitalisation later. In this context, eco-sensory photography seems much more than just a genre, rather it presents a way of rebalancing self with nature as both prevention and cure from the rising crisis of mental ill-health in Western Europe and Northern Ireland in particular (my geographical area of focus).

In my current long-term Goddess project, I’m following the course of the River Bann, tracing native and invasive flora along its mutable edges. On one level, I’m photographically documenting ecological patterns. On another, I’m tracing a metaphor for my own mental health recovery—how invasive species mirror unwanted intrusive thoughts and how native plants represent mental resilience and normative thinking. Here, an eco‑centric approach rather obligingly gifts me both methodology and metaphor.

In his praise for The Spell of the Sensuous, ‘geologian’ – as he described himself (in preference to theologian or eco-theologian) - Father Thomas Berry’s summative insight shines:

“The outer world of nature is what awakens our inner world in all its capacities for understanding, affection and aesthetic appreciation.”

Perhaps this is a state of being most intuitively experienced by the various Indigenous peoples that Abram shared his time with while observing reverential behaviours with natural environments. For my part, what I take from Father Berry’s doctrinal reminder is that the boundary we presume between self and landscape is, in fact, a liminal zone of continual exchange, one that requires patient engagement to receive its benefaction.

My own temporal “coming and going between the natural world and artificiality,” as Japanese photographer Takashi Homma puts it, sees me only as a visitor to restorative natural landscapes before returning home. Irrespective, I fear that by bringing ‘artificiality’ with me into nature, tethered and unwilling sacrifice to the algorithms that I confess have successfully hacked my biorhythms, it may not be possible to share the same clarity of revelatory experience that Abram enjoyed after the 1985 hurricane.

Thankfully, this is where photographing in nature helps direct my attention to my environment and away from my mobile. Even when held in readiness, the camera exerts a willpower of attentiveness, resolve and anticipatory enjoyment that I struggle to maintain without it. This attention holding focus also successfully diverts my compulsiveness away from negative unwanted thoughts that pervaded my spells of mental ill health. Practicing therapeutic photography, a lifeline skill cultivated during two transformational years within Belfast Exposed’s Therapeutic Photography Programme, formed a cornerstone of my mental health recovery that I still rely on.

Eco-sensory photography, as I understand and practice it, goes beyond merely documenting nature. It’s about the process of embedding myself within it. My camera becomes a kind of tuning fork, heightening awareness of colour, shape, texture, sound, smell and movement. The more I slow down, the more I feel rooted. The more I look, the more I also listen. My practice is experiential and reflexive—often blending aesthetics, an awakening activism through conceptual enquiry and a mental acquisitiveness to learn more. For me, this process overlaps seamlessly with therapeutic photography when practiced in nature as a space for healing or embodied presence, reweaving self and setting.

Neil Gibson, a specialist in therapeutic photography, puts it well:

“The art of slowing down and becoming aware of our surroundings is actually a significant part of mindfulness practice. Mindfulness involves awareness of our internal feelings, while also taking note of what is going on around us and how that impacts on our immediate well-being.”

It is perhaps for this reason that therapeutic photography becomes all the more potent when practised in nature. It stimulates a deeper sensory engagement, evoking emotional, psychological, and even physiological responses that reconnects me to my surroundings. Crucially, it restored a form of relationship with nature that the pace and expectation of modern life had eroded when heading towards my breakdown. The Spell of the Sensuous is not a photographical text, but through its rich eco-philosophical content, has helped me understand how the embodied way of seeing I experience when photographing, places me within the panoply of nature rather than above or outside it.

This kind of sensory activation, which being embedded in natural landscapes stimulate, awakens a deeper sense of self precisely because it is rooted in connection. In contrast, I’ve noticed a dulling of perception when returning home from longer durations in nature. In place of the soothing ever-present multi-tonal greens and biologically seductive colours of wild plants designed to attract insects and animals, we encounter the deadened textures of concrete, brick and pebbledash. Urban colour may appear bright in places—illuminated signage, oversized advertising hoardings, fast visual stimuli—but it does not carry scent or sound on the wind, nor invite my eye to linger, wander and wonder. Instead of being seduced into relation, I feel bombarded and overloaded with information which seems mostly superfluous to my needs. The result is often, I believe, a closing off of self, a sensory narrowing that mirrors and perhaps deepens mental and emotional disconnection.

The challenge for the medium of photography then is how to faithfully convey our own visual experience of being enfolded by nature, let alone reflect our other senses and the ineffable senses contained in nature responding in turn to our presence. An openness to being and intuitive experimentation to reflect a sense of the felt rather than the seen has become my way to artistically convey connection. Perhaps it is enough to be about the moment experienced when taking a photograph and not the futile Sisyphean-like task to capture all which exists within and beyond it.

At the end of this reflection, I realise that I value being in nature not as escapism, but as a necessary part of recovering meaning of self after psychological dislocation. To discover who I am in relation to place, how I sense when fully present, and what it means to listen to a more-than-human world that is alive with healing potential.