I’ve been watching some videos that I took years ago of my brother Michael and me. Mike is my older brother, who is low functioning, autistic and nonverbal. For me, an ongoing issue is whether my memory is faithful to actual events. It is important to me, although I’m not sure why. The videos refresh […]
Photographs lie My first inkling that photographs do not tell the truth came from a conversation with Mom. “Michael never really was like that,” she used to say about some of the old snapshots we would look at now and then. It wasn’t too often, because it was painful for her to remember. There was something […]
My search to understand my older brother, Michael, who is autistic, very low functioning, and nonverbal has led me in many different directions. I have read about epistemology, the study of what is knowable; theories of consciousness; anatomy of the brain; principles of neuropsychiatry to get some idea of what could be going on in […]
This post was originally written while I was becoming fully engaged in getting to know my older brother, who is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. It reveals my mindset at that time. It is a bit of a journal entry, and an insight into my artistic process. I call it my ‘artistic process’ because my […]
In 1993 I went to one of the best photography workshops I had ever gone to. It was with Eugene Richards, a Photographer, Magnum Photojournalist, Filmmaker and Artist. As with the other photography and vision classes, I brought my photographs of Michael, to get an assessment and more insight about how to further express my […]
When I used to visit my brother Michael, at his Day Program, sorting was one of the challenges the teacher presented him and his classmates with. “This sock goes with the rest of the socks in this basket,” a classroom assistant would urge. It was a task that eluded him. It is a task that […]
So I started taking pictures of my brother, and I had a vague idea of the book I wanted to write. What happens next? I took more photography courses and classes about refining my vision. I found that I had to filter through advice about composing a photographic memoir and make some decisions. For example, […]
Striving to portray my brother I am a big believer in learning. If one can learn from the best, it is wonderful. I had great opportunities to take classes from world-class photographers at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City. In a previous post, I mentioned one of these classes with Nubar […]
Here I begin a series of occasional posts about my attempts to gather my thoughts, photographs and writing into a coherent narrative about my relationship with my older autistic brother and my family. Facing such a task can be overwhelming: Thoughts can be muddled, photography skills may not be up to par; even the statement of […]
In a previous post, I mentioned that I would be skipping around the timeline in my recollections of growing up and trying to understand my older brother. I wrote the following shortly after Mike was placed in permanent housing after the mandated closing of Willowbrook, a large mental institution on Staten Island, NY. First Impressions […]
