Maybe you need to look at the problem from a new angle — from above, below, upside down, or askew. Try taking photos with nothing in the center, only on the sides. Or try one whole week of shooting only from above your head or from a worm’s-eye view.
Or think like someone else for a while. Look at the problem from the perspective of different people you know — a more analytic friend, a more sensitive friend, a child, or even a fictional character, like a pirate.
Can you close your eyes and assign a color to a sound you hear? What does a smell look like?
In his novel All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr describes how the character Marie-Laure, who is blind, sees everything in color in her imagination. Her beloved papa takes on different colors depending on whom he is talking to or what he is doing — olive green when he’s speaking to a museum department head, bright red during his cooking attempts, “an escalating series of oranges when he speaks to Mademoiselle Fleury.” And “he glows sapphire when he sits over his workbench in the evenings.”
Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII (1913)
For people with a neurological condition called synesthesia, the senses are unusually intertwined. For example, musicians as diverse as Itzhak Perlman, Duke Ellington, Pharrell Williams, and Billy Joel are known for associating colors with different musical tones, timbres, or keys. The composer Franz Liszt flummoxed his orchestra with instructions like, “O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please!”