Visible Spectrum:Portraits from the world of Autism

I have been photographing people on the autism spectrum and pairing the photographs with text written by the subjects, their parents or me.

Visible Spectrum: Portraits from the World of Autism

I have been immersed in the world of autism since my son was diagnosed with Aspergers.

While autism can present herculean challenges for some, many people with autism have remarkable strengths. Singular figures from history who were likely on the autism spectrum include Michelangelo, Newton, Mozart, Austen, Kant, Darwin, Turing, Einstein, Emily Dickinson, Wittgenstein and Warhol. Temple Grandin was only half joking when she said that without autism, humans would still be “standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done”.

One salient trait these groundbreakers shared (on top of intense passion and focus), was seeing the world in a new way; they were the epitome of “out of the box thinkers.” A potential downside of seeing things differently from most people is confusion and anxiety resulting from not understanding others’ motivations (autism being partially a social communication disorder). The most popular website by and for the autism community is called wrongplanet.net.

Most people with autism are not great geniuses. But each looks at the world in a unique way, often refreshing in its originality and lack of pretense. We need to better understand the autistic, not only to make the world a kinder place for them, but to broaden our own perspectives.

By engaging the viewer with visually compelling and emotionally nuanced portraits, I hope to draw them into the the subjects’ worlds. The photographs will be accompanied by text written by the subjects, their parents or me, distilled in brief for exhibit walls, rendered longer in book form. The project will widen and deepen our experience of autism, and by extension, our experience of difference. Most importantly, it will help dispel common misperceptions that reinforce stigmas and obscure the strengths of so many on the autism spectrum.