Cover image From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

As a longtime admirer of Amani Willet’s work, I was eager to experience his newest book, Invisible Sun, published by Dust Collective. This is an unusual and immersive work—one that calls for a quiet descent into the unknown and unfamiliar.

The journey begins with a cover that radiates light, gold, and brilliance, only to plunge into darkness upon opening the book. Willett skillfully weaves a visual and emotional narrative through themes of light and shadow, self and family, presence and fragility. The work evokes a sense of the otherworldly—an exploration of the disorienting states brought on by illness, memory, and the body’s hidden knowledge. The physicality of the book itself deepens this experience. Large black stitches anchor the pages, grounding the work in a tactile honesty that complements Emily Scheffer’s exquisite design for Dust Collective.

Invisible Sun opens with a line from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, setting a tone of spiritual searching, and closes with Willett’s deeply resonant statement: “I explore the space between memory and embodiment—where the body holds what the mind forgets.” Willett’s work is not easily summarized; it asks to be felt as much as seen. Quiet, haunting, and beautifully constructed, Invisible Sun is a profound meditation on what it means to live—and remember—in the dark and in the light.

An interview between Lenscratch Editor Sandy Sugawara and Amani Willet follows.

From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

INVISIBLE SUN is a personal reckoning—a visual meditation on survival, transformation, and the fragility of being. As a child, I survived two life-threatening medical events that left a lasting imprint, shaping how I move through the world.

Years later, new chronic health challenges brought those early traumas back to the surface. In seeking to process them, I turned to intensive therapies, including Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, where I encountered vivid, often unsettling visions, including those of my younger self. These visions became central to the creation of this body of work.

Using photographs of my children as stand-ins, landscapes, photographic experimentations, and AI-generated imagery, I explore the space between memory and embodiment—where the body holds what the mind forgets. This work is an attempt to give shape to those fragments and offer a visual language for what is often left unspoken. – Amani Willet

From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

Amani Willett is a Brooklyn and Boston-based photographer whose practice is driven by conceptual ideas surrounding family, history, memory, and the social environment. Working primarily with the book form, his three monographs—Disquiet (Damiani, 2013), The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer (Overlapse, 2017), and A Parallel Road (Overlapse, 2020)—have received widespread critical acclaim.

His work is featured in several books about photography, and resides in the collections of the Tate Modern, The Library of the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Sir Elton John Photography Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Oxford University, and Harvard University, among others.

Amani completed an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 2012 and a BA from Wesleyan University in 1997. In addition to his artistic practice, he is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

Instagram @amaniwillett 

Instagram @dustcollective

From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

Sandy Sugawara: “Invisible Sun” is a remarkable book – haunting, mesmerizing and unlike anything I’ve seen before. Perhaps you can start out by explaining how this book evolved from a series of traumatic experiences, including two life threatening events when you were a child in Tanzania, and how more recent chronic health issues caused those earlier memories to resurface.

Amani Willett: It really began with my more recent history – trying to navigate a number of chronic health issues that have emerged over the last few years. Those experiences unexpectedly caused earlier childhood traumas to resurface and express themselves in my adult life. I began to realize that I needed to reconnect with a younger part of myself in order to tend to wounds that were never fully addressed when I was a child.

To do that, I explored a number of therapeutic approaches, including ketamineassisted therapy, which became a way for me to access and better understand my
early childhood experiences and how they were continuing to reverberate in the present. With all of my projects, I tend to work from whatever is most immediate in my mind, and for the past four or five years, that has been these unresolved traumas and their long echoes into adulthood. Making images became a way to
confront and sit with that reality.

From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

SS: I found your use of Artificial Intelligence fascinating. Can you describe your process for using AI to capture the visions you saw during your therapies, which included Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and journaling.

AW: As you describe so well, ketamine-assisted therapy allowed me access to a younger part of myself and helped me understand what might be needed to heal
him. During the sessions, I experienced very vivid imagery – falling, moving through different dimensions, feeling the world collapse in on itself, or revisiting
memories I hadn’t accessed in years. As soon as the sessions ended, I would write furiously in my journal, trying to capture everything before it slipped away. At one point, almost as an experiment, I took some of those journal entries and input them into a large language model trained on my own photographic archive. I
was genuinely surprised by the results. The images it generated didn’t literally recreate my experiences, but they tapped into the emotional essence of what I felt
during those sessions in a way I hadn’t thought possible.

That led me to incorporate those images into the book. They work because they exist in dialogue with the photographs made through more traditional means. For
me, storytelling is always cumulative – it’s the sum of all the parts, and those AI generated images only function because of their relationship to everything else in
the book.

From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

SS:You start off the book with a quote from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” The quote includes the line: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” The T.S. Eliot poem is about many things, including the fragility of life, the cycle of death and rebirth and facing our fears. Did you have that poem in mind as you were conceiving of this book? It’s a perfect entrée into your book.

AW: I actually didn’t have T.S. Eliot’s poem in mind while I was making the book. It wasn’t until I was working closely with my publisher that we came across that line – “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” – and it immediately felt right. As I read more about Eliot’s life, particularly his struggles with chronic pain and unresolved trauma, the connection became even clearer.

From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

SS: Let’s talk a bit about storytelling. I first noticed your unique and compelling storytelling style in your 2017 book, “The Disappearance of Joseph Plummer.” The “Invisible Sun” ventures into even more creative narrative directions. You build a narrative arc and develop a compelling cadence through your selections of first and last photos, your mix of landscapes and photographs of your children, by shifting between dreamlike and sharper images, and through the use of photographic grace notes – like the foldout with a child on the operating
table. Do you have the narrative already in your head when you are creating and selecting the photos? How do you think about sequencing?

AW: I really appreciate your reading of the book – it touches on many of the things I’m thinking about when I make work. I usually begin with a loose narrative or
conceptual sketch, but it’s during the book-making process that I gain the most control and begin shaping image relationships more deliberately. I might start with an idea of where a book opens and where it ends, but the journey between those points is where things become most interesting. I work intuitively, but I also think carefully about how images can relate to one another – through subject matter, form, color, mood, or rhythm. There are many different ways to move a narrative forward.

At the same time, I want the work to remain open-ended. I hope viewers can bring their own experiences to the book and walk away with different interpretations.
Emotion plays a central role in that. Even if someone hasn’t lived through the same experiences, they can often connect through feeling. That emotional logic – more than a strictly rational one – tends to guide my sequencing, which can make the narrative feel unconventional but, I hope, deeply experiential.

From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

SS: Can you discuss your use of monotones and colors, especially reds and blues, to set the tone of a section and propel the narrative?

AW: That aspect of the work really emerged during the sequencing process. I didn’t consciously set out to work with reds and blues, but once I started laying the
images out, those colors revealed themselves as dominant and meaningful. Red became closely tied to the body – to flesh, vulnerability, and physical presence – while blue suggested longing, distance, and the feeling of reaching for something just out of grasp. When paired with the black-and-white images, those colors helped articulate the tension between embodiment and yearning in ways that resonated deeply with me. It was one of those moments where the bookmaking
process revealed something I hadn’t fully understood while I was shooting.

From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

SS: The images of white birds against a black sky are riveting. Can you describe the role they play in the book?

AW: The birds operate on several levels. Structurally, they act as separators between sections of the book – marking transitions from childhood, to adolescence, to
adulthood. Like chapters in a novel, they give the viewer a moment to pause and reset.

Symbolically, they reflect my relationship to both the natural world and the cosmos. There’s a visual and conceptual overlap between the birds and the images of outer space – the idea of the known world colliding with the unknown. They function as moments of rest, but also as bridges between earthbound experience and something much larger.

From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

SS: The book is wonderful as an art object itself – the beautiful thick paper, the sticker in the back with the text, the lay flat stitch binding, the gorgeous cover which seems to radiate sunlight. It has a homemade feel to it. How did your thinking on the cover evolve?

AW: Thank you for noticing those details – they were incredibly important to both meand my publisher. We wanted the book to feel handmade and intimate, while still being produced at a scale that allowed it to circulate widely. The thick paper, the fold-out, the sticker used for the artist statement- all of those choices were about making the book feel approachable, like something you’d want to pick up, hold, and spend time with.

Covers are always tricky. I tend to avoid covers that simply reproduce an image from inside the book. Instead, I like covers that define the spirit of the work without revealing it outright. We went back and forth on many ideas, trying to convey the sense of the sun being obscured while still holding onto hope and
mystery. When this final idea emerged, it immediately felt right – we both knew we had found it.

From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

SS: After the last photo of birds, in which the white birds seem to explode all over the page, there is this:
It was a quiet thing,
this new beginning.
Like watching a tree bud in March
and realizing you’d forgotten
it could do that.

And then there are photographs of a baby and of a man in a body of water. Death
and rebirth. Can you talk about the ending and about art as healing.

AW: Thank you. That reading is very much in line with what we hoped to achieve. We wanted the ending to suggest rebirth, but not in a neat or resolved way. It’s more about a quiet beginning – stepping into something new without knowing exactly what comes next.

As for art as healing, I’m cautious about that framing. Making art is regenerative for me – it connects me to creativity and to what feels meaningful in life – but I
don’t know that it offers closure or resolution. It’s more like therapy in that sense: part of an ongoing process rather than an endpoint. Like the figure at the end of
the book, it’s about moving forward into uncertainty, not because everything is resolved, but because continuing is necessary.

Spread From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective

SS: Is there anything else I forgot to ask that you would like to mention?

AW: I don’t think so. These are wonderful questions, and I really appreciate how deeply you engaged with the book. Thank you for taking the time to truly understand what we were trying to do with Invisible Sun!

Spread From ‘Invisible Sun’ by Amani Willett published by Dust Collective