Photography as an Artefact of a State of Consciousness
We tend to think that we are here, and therefore we are conscious. That consciousness is ultimately a consequence of the brain: an extraordinary neurological development that emerged as human beings evolved into increasingly self-aware creatures.
My experiences have made that explanation feel insufficient. To me, it seems to be the other way around: that consciousness is fundamental, and what we experience as physical reality arises within it. From consciousness comes reality, instead of reality creating consciousness.
To quote Rupert Spira;
“Consciousness is that in which all experiences appear.”
An Otters Muse from my Shades of Fae collection
I won’t pretend to understand what consciousness is. I have had transcendental experiences that radically changed my perception of space, time and the nature of being, but these experiences cannot be explained rationally.
As these experiences involve transcending the rational mind, how could I then box it into a conceptual framework composed of words created by the mind?
I cannot really explain them, nor do I wish to dilute them.
Instead, I explore them.
And one of the ways I do that is through photography.
Looking Into the World
I've encountered nature photographers whose work seems to reveal a much deeper, more complex awareness of the natural world. They don't appear to be looking at nature. They seem to be looking into it.
That distinction fascinates me because it is this shift of perception that has completely changed my relationship to life itself.
Much of modern life fosters the opposite state. We move quickly. We seek to aim, achieve, gain, get somewhere or do something. We got this to focus on, that problem to solve, this thing coming up. Consistently stimulated and mentally occupied we move through life in a habitual glaze. Looking, but rarely ever seeing.
But with slowing down, we open ourselves up to perceive. We begin to take in more of life around us and with intntion, we can choose to look deeper. It is this depth that I explore, this expansion of consciousness and awareness.
But when something is created with intention, awareness, presence or in a genuine flow state, I believe the result is palpably different from something created while half of the mind is elsewhere.
I think of our consciousness as acting like metadata. You can't necessarily see it, but it's embedded in the art.
If there is a person in the image, this becomes even more apparent. Someone could meditate into the moment while another person dissociates from it. They could be posed exactly the same, but I believe you would know the difference.
Consciousness is imprinted into everything we do.
That is what I mean when I call my work an artefact of a state of consciousness.
Elemental Entrance
There were a few moments that really changed how I understood this.
One happened when I returned to photography after a long period of not shooting.
At that point in my life, I was coming out of a deeply contractive and depressive period. I had to leave my home. I moved into a shepherd's hut on a farm. I was broke, directionless and lost.
A brother of mine, Matreya, recommended I reach out to a fashion stylist, a women I once met, and do a shoot with her.
At this point I hadn't done photography properly in two or three years. I had given up on that dream and was trying to find a new purpose to give myself to.
But I took him up on the recommendation and messaged her.
Her name was Kailan.
What happened was beautiful.
Sparks flew between us. We both felt inspired and were filled with love and admiration for each other. A relationship began blossoming between us, and eventually we decided to shoot for the first time.
She was dressed in this stunning laced vintage attire, bejewelled to the nines. Her style was something I had never seen before and it completely enchanted me.
The forest we were in was ancient, with these magnificent oak and chestnut elders that were hundreds of years old. My breath was taken away by this forest and by the beauty in front of me.
After this low chapter, I now found myself in an elated state of connection with all of life. Walking through the forest, I felt myself entering that creative flow state again.
Since I sold all of my camera gear I was shooting on an old film camera that was given to me. This had me thinking more thoughtfully, as I lined each shot up meticulously to ensure no film was wasted.
Once the film was processed, I immediately knew this was some of my favourite work. The love for photography took over and my dream was back alive.
And then came the Spring Equinox…
A shamanic practitioner unpromptly and generously invited me to do a ceremony to welcome in a new era of my life. We drank cacao, danced, meditated and journalled into the evening of March 21st 2023.
I looked over the film that had been processed from the shoot.
It was then, at the moment of the year where the light takes over the dark, that I saw my art on a whole other level. It felt like I was seeing it for the first time.
There were layers to this forest that I did not see in the moment, but I had felt.
There’s layers only a trained eye will see, but every heart will sense it. Shot during a time enraptured by love and enchanted by life, the secrets of the natural world revealed itself to me.
Framed by ancient bark and winter light, this nymph stands as an echo of a myth, a memory of a world forgotten. It is not a fantasy, it is a portal into dimensions that are ever present, enduring beneath modern noise. She was always there, just waiting for eyes that could see.
Magic is real, and it’s waiting for you to invoke it.
This photograph is part of an ongoing body of work called Shades of Fae exploring the mystical relationship between human presence and the living natural world. Each piece is released in a limited edition and will not be reproduced once the edition is complete. Can you find all the fae?
Only 250 Prints available
Only 100 Framed Prints available
All signed and numbered by yours truly
Giclée prints
Non-reflective Invisible UV protected glass
*As each piece is made to order, all sales are final once dispatched. Please allow 4-6 weeks to be crafted and shipped
I could see all sorts of beings in the forest. Faces, figures, anthropomorphic forms and something more intuitive all at the same time. I could see the spirits of the trees alive and strong. I could see them posing and holding the image. Working with me. I could see them responding to Kailan and Kailan in harmony with them.
That photograph became Elemental Entrance, not only a defining piece in my Shades of Fae collection but the very piece that showed me that I was making art. It was that night that I saw a vision of this portal framed, and me offering it to the world.
The image resembled the world as it objectively was, but it carries something deeper. A state of consciousness that was elevated; endowed with enchantment, reverence and awe.
Meditated upon, you will see this image open and deepen. As you enter, layers of reality begin to open up.
Catching a Scent
This elemental experience helped me understand something about how I actually create.
When I have a creative idea, it's usually a vision that comes to me. I then create the conditions to bring that vision to life.
But when I'm finally inside those conditions, I surrender.
I let intuition and the model-photographer-environment relationship guide the shoot.
The vision acts as a north star, but I allow anything else to appear. Often, better outcomes appear through doing this as we turn from constructing an image into discovering one.
When I'm shooting, at times I enter a flow state. I become so engulfed that there is just presence with the moment, the model and the scene. I become sensitive to my senses and a lot of my awareness is pulled into an internal sensation.
I call it catching a scent.
Internally I am feeling something, something I can't explain, but I follow the thread of it. I follow this elusive sensation of resonance like a sort of compass. It guides me towards the right line-up, where the light, backdrop, model and camera come together and suddenly I can see into the whole thing. The "portal", as I like to call it.
During this time, i'm not really thinking. In those moments, there is no mind.
For me, the planning only gets me so far but presence takes me the rest of the way.
Pan's Nymph
This happened again when creating Pan's Nymph.
I walked past a birch tree grove and sensed something was there.
But we had an objective in mind so the team and I carried on.
Later, we walked past it a second time and I started feeling the same sensation again. This time I glanced over and saw a spiral composition moving through the forest.
My senses heightened. I started becoming overstimulated and I just knew:
We need to shoot now.
We dropped our bags and Kailan moved into the spiral I could see. Fyko began adding additional elements to her, including ferns on her head which ended up looking almost like horns.
Immediately, I saw it. There was a spirit or entity here to capture.
Whether it was real, archetypal, symbolic or something entirely within me, I don't know.
But something magical was alive there.
Reviewing the photograph afterwards, more came to life. Again, there faces in the trees. The illuminating composition. The sacred geometry moving through the forest. The art revealing an encounter, carrying the expansion of consciousness.
This is why I'm drawn back to nature again and again.
In these spaces I feel connected to something bigger than just myself. And through the work I see layers of meaning and symbolism. I see my own awareness reflecting back at me.
Same Forest, Different Worlds
This is the power of perspective.
You could have three photographers standing in exactly the same forest, photographing exactly the same things, and each photograph would have a completely different energy to it.
The person feeling loneliness is oriented towards capturing loneliness.
They might notice the single flower peeking from the ferns, or the dying tree standing alone.
A photographer in love might lean towards the dappling sunlight through the trees or the fox dens shaped by the roots of an ancien beech.
Meanwhile, I find myself capturing these portal into another world. I'm looking for the sacred geometry, the spirals through the forest, the gateways in the sky composed by branches. I am looking for that which translates my sense that there is much more here than what we may consciously know.
Consciously or subconsciously, we are moved towards that which resonates with us. Towards that which feels alive to us or perhaps like us.
Therefore what we create and what we choose to engage with, is a reflection of us.
The three photographers create three different feelings because they live in three unique realities.
Same forest shared, but different worlds explored.
Personally, I am fascinated with the worlds unseen. The layers to this world that require deep presence, attention and a fertile spirit for the unraveling of the otherworldly.
The Unseen & Otherworldly
When I talk about the unseen or otherworldly, I mean that there is more to reality than what meets the eye.
We perceive only a fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. There are frequencies we can't hear and scents we can't smell. Our senses give us an extraordinary experience of reality, but they do not give us all of reality.
There are layers to existence that we cannot directly perceive or fully understand.
From my own experiences, I believe altered states of consciousness can sometimes give us glimmers of these otherworldly, unseen dimensions of existence.
Attention, emotion and imagination can also reveal more to life than what we experience then when we unconsciously move through it.
Modern materialism often has us oriented towards physicality as the ultimate truth of life.
Yet my experiences have left me open to there being much more.
That's what I explore and work with in my art.
Returning Consciousness
A lot of social media content, advertising and consumerism extracts consciousness.
Art, thoughtful creation and passionate content can nourish it.
We live within an attention economy largely designed to capture consciousness. I want CallumVision to create in a way that returns people to it and nourishes it.
Story, myth, symbolism, connection and enchantment are some of the codes of these artefacts I seek to create. These are things that give more life rather than take it away. They provide mirrors for us to see ourselves and to see the unification within our human experiences.
If someone stood in front of an Elemental Entrance or Pans Nymph piece, I would hope they felt a sense of awe and magnificence.
I would hope they saw more to life.
Therefore success, to me, would be helping foster the understanding that our ordinary perception of reality as a three-dimensional physical thing is limited, and for them to leave with either a sense or confirmation that life is filled with so much more depth.
If they left that gallery, went into a forest and felt the natural world in a more receptive and communal way, that's a big victory for me.
Because that is ultimately what I want these photographs to do.
Not tell you exactly what reality is, but perhaps make you receptive enough to realise there may be more of it.
My Shades of Fae collection is crafted to re-enchant the world. All pieces are printed and framed in limited numbers. Signed and numbered. To collect the fae while you can, visit my gallery here
About the Artist
Callum Shaw is a British fine-art, editorial and commissioned photographer working under CallumVision, based in the West Midlands and working across Birmingham, Worcestershire and throughout the UK.
His fine-art photography explores consciousness, nature, mythology and the unseen, often using the natural world as a space to explore altered perception, symbolism and our relationship with something larger than ourselves. He describes his photographs as “artefacts of a state of consciousness” — images shaped not only by what stood in front of the camera, but by the presence, perspective and lived experience through which the moment was encountered.
Alongside his fine-art practice, Callum undertakes selected photography commissions for artists, musicians, brands, couples and creative projects, including editorial photography, artist campaigns, portraits, weddings and elopements. His commissioned work carries the same emphasis on atmosphere, storytelling, natural environments and creating images that feel distinctly alive.
Through collections including Shades of Fae, Callum continues to explore the places where the familiar becomes otherworldly, seeking to restore a sense of mystery, connection and enchantment to the way we experience the world.
Explore Callum Shaw’s fine-art photography through the CallumVision Legacy Gallery, or enquire about commissioned photography in Birmingham, Worcestershire, the West Midlands and across the UK.
