I Love You One Hundred

I’m working on a photobook with conceptual, abstract, and realistic photographs to show life through my child’s eyes. Gabriel was diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum when we moved to New York in 2012. I’m showing the way I believe he grows, sees, approaches, and comprehends the world around him. His vision is like everyone else’s unique, but probably because of his autism, I see a distinctly abstract, poetic nature to that vision. There is a music to his gestures, in the way he holds his head, turns his body, gathers his attention. That music, depending on the circumstances, plays louder or softer in comparison to a neurotypical child like his brother, but after even a brief moment with him, it’s impossible not to feel pushed to some mysterious emotional edge. When a highly regarded speech therapist on the Upper East Side of Manhattan concluded when Gabriel was 6 that “he doesn’t process language” I understood that the limits of language ran both ways. There was, perhaps, only so much that Gabriel could understand through language, but it was equally true that there was only so much that language could do to express his unique way of experiencing and transforming reality.