Olivia Jospé Visual Snow

This body of work looks at the condition ‘Visual snow syndrome’ which is a continuous visual disturbance that occupies the entire visual field and is described as tiny flickering dots that resemble the noise of a detuned analogue television. Each person’s visual snow is unique to them with varying experiences and there is so much more to the impairment than just seeing static. There are visual and non-visual symptoms that create constant debilitation in the person’s day to day life. These include floaters, photophobia, palinopsia, tinnitus, derealization, anxiety, brain fog, dizziness and insomnia.
A few years ago, in 2017, my best friend Yaz was diagnosed with visual snow syndrome following a negative experience with a hallucinogenic. At the time, I was never truly able to understand what she was going through because I had no knowledge on the impairment. It is considered a rare disorder which afflicts may people but this either gets shunned by doctors who tell them it is all in their head or if they developed Visual Snow at a young age, to them it has always been normal so why question it.
Bringing awareness to this impairment is so important to me as I have seen first-hand how Visual Snow can affect mental health and quality of life. So, through focusing on my model, her visual and non-visual symptoms, I have been able to gain a deeper understanding into her journey and in effect explore the syndrome through different photographic processes to create an abstract, surreal way of visualizing this impairment which alters the way people see the world. This ongoing body of work is not a factual realistic documentation of Visual Snow. Rather, it is meant as an exploration into Yaz’ experience and I express her symptoms in a way that can continuously disorientate the viewer, taking them out of their own reality and allowing them to digest it, learn about it and visualize it even if it is for just a short moment. At the core of this project, I simply must understand how someone else sees.