Unlike Normals

My project ‘Unlike Normals’ is a photographic panegyric to the autistic life. It appears, at first, visually strange and rather interesting, however, contextually, the project explores struggles of living with autism, imposed by societal perceptions of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I wanted to visually document through abstract portraiture the understandings, feelings and perceptions of autistic people. My work largely focussed on the idea of masking, a behaviour utilised by many autistic people as a way to often ‘camouflage’ themselves into everyday life, appearing as allistic and likeable as possible. The title of my project, ‘Unlike Normals’, came from a paper I read in which autistic children were described as being ‘Unlike normals’. My initial reaction to this was to question what that meant. Admittedly, the paper was rather outdated, having been from 2001, but in the context of time that’s not all that long, and I remained unconvinced that perceptions and understanding of autism had really come all that far. I decided to focus my project on autism to characterise the autistic life, and my own experiences as an autistic woman, through my own photography.