Autists and Photogra
If you look at my school photographs in my childhood, you will laugh. I smiled far too widely and had terribly bucked teeth. No one would have said that I was a beautiful child. Even once I had braces, my photographs are painfully stiff, me staring into the camera and trying to figure out exactly the right amount of smile. The photos of me as a child that were taken by one of my parents are all with me facing away from the camera. If I wasn’t aware of it, I acted normally. But facing the camera, the deer-in-the-headlights look appears.
In my teen years, I understood photographs as a kind of social ritual. I held to a very strict script for them. I had to wear makeup and to put on a dress of some kind. I had to do my hair and “look my best” because that was what was required. It felt like someone had given me a list of rules and I was following them. I have a handful of photos of myself that are candid in my high school years, and some of them look real. The dance photos and yearbook photos are embarrassingly odd. I look too old and too formal and just — not like a teen.
My family, largely autistic or autism-adjacent, did not often do formal family photographs. One year, my father tried to get all eleven of his children and spouses and grandchildren together for a photo in someone’s backyard. He was very upset about how much he had to pay for this photographer, and then several family members simply didn’t show up. After waiting around for an hour, we finally took the photos without the family members, all of us in our unmatched Sunday best. God, it is a terrible photo. And also a very telling one.
If someone tried to get me to pose for a “natural” photograph, I couldn’t really fathom this and would usually refuse. One year, I was told that the theme for my in-law family photographs was denim. So I found a denim dress. I was just trying to follow the rules, but I stand out like a sore thumb in that photo where everyone else rightly understood the denim command to be about wearing actual, you know, jeans. On the other hand, I kind of liked standing out like a sore thumb because that was a true photo of me.
Then there began a long period of me “hiding” in photographs of the family. Part of this was because I am so much smaller than my in-law family and it became a sore subject for me to be constantly told to move to the front, where they children were. Yes, I am about the size of an average fourth or fifth grader, but I didn’t like to be told that meant I had to be with the children in photographs. It wasn’t that hard for me to hide partially behind the taller children I was next to. Sometimes, I would ignore the order to stand by the children and stay in the back, with only my head peeking out.
“Do you not like the way you look in photos? Do you think you look fat?” the family photographer asked, eager to assure me that I didn’t look fat.
But my shyness with photos had nothing to do with that. It wasn’t that I looked at a photo and thought I looked bad. I just didn’t think I looked outside the way I felt inside. There was a painful disjunction. I didn’t feel small and that was one of the things I could explain. In my head, I’m a tall person. Even now, people who only know me online are astonished when they meet me in person and find out how small I am.
“You seem like a very large person online,” they say in confusion.
I also feel very a very large person with a dominant personality and very strong opinions.
But photographs are not like that. They don’t show the inside, only the outside.
There is something else about photos that I don’t like that is difficult to explain that has to do with autism and my hyperverbal nature. I am a meat sack filled with words. I don’t *see* the world; I hear it. I have spent much of my life being visually blind to many details. I don’t notice clothes or hair styles or makeup. I don’t relate to other people based on how they look at all. I relate to them based on their words, how they talk. And photographs seem to force me to acknowledge that this isn’t at all how other people inhabit the world, or how they see me.
It is very strange, and I’m convinced that many autists struggle with photographs precisely because they show us to ourselves in a completely social, flat way, and not at all how we experience ourselves or others.