Tuesday 9 December 2025
We were delighted to welcome Ken Scott ARPS APAGB MBPsS for a thought-provoking talk titled “It’s All in the Mind – An Introduction to Photopsychology”. This fascinating presentation explored how our minds influence not only what we see, but also how we respond to photographs – and why different images resonate so strongly with different people.
Ken challenged us to consider what shapes our visual preferences. How do composition and colour affect our emotional response? Why do facial expressions and body language command our attention? And how do our personal experiences and social environments influence the way we interpret images as photographers?
A key theme of the evening was our reliance on labels. We categorise everything as a way of understanding the world, “landscape”, “portrait”, “street”, “abstract”. But Ken asked: what happens when those labels are removed? By stripping photography back to its fundamentals, we can begin to see more clearly.
The talk took us back to the raw building blocks of vision: light, contrast, line and colour. Ken introduced the basics of visual cognition, explaining how our brains process and interpret what we see. Expression, emotion and visual tension were explored in ways that encouraged us to look beyond the obvious and recognise that each of us sees the world uniquely.
It’s All in the Mind invited us to look beneath the surface of photography, better understand our own responses to images, and embrace the personal nature of seeing. A stimulating and inspiring evening that gave many of us plenty to reflect on long after the talk ended.
For more on this subject Ken recommended the work of Beau Lotte (for example his TED talks here).
Ken’s recommended reading list can be found here.
More of Ken’s work can be found via the following links:
Website: touchingthelight.co.uk
Facebook: Touchingthelight
Flickr: touchingthelight