Reproducing ideas

We know of "photographic memory", or the ability to remember information or visual images in great detail. But "photographic ideation"? Jack Whitten, an American abstract painter, in 1964, came up with a way of describing his artistic vision: “The image is photographic, therefore I must photograph my thoughts.” By this, he meant, “I can see it in my brain, and it’s reproduced. I’m using the word ‘reproduce’ in the same sense that you would use a Xerox copy machine or a computer—any form of a reproduction device.” By using the word 'reproduce', however, Whitten's might involuntary "devalue" his work of art according to Walter Benjamin's held view (1936) that technical reproduction loses the original. But Whitten's artistic vision (visual thought) as represented in external visual form (paintings) is original, not reproduction. A less conflicted way of looking at Whitten's "thought photography" may be that his artistic vision is but visual ideas (images) made concrete in the act of making paintings. In other words, the artistic vision, in the making of art, is not so much a photographic process, of transforming the latent image into a visible image, where the vision is merely illustrated, or reproduced, but a process where the illustration ("photograph") is part of conceptualisation (ideation).