Autists and Photographs

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…