The following is a more in depth look at some of the pictures displayed in the autism photogallery.

Lining up Objects

   

These two pictures clearly demonstrate a typical Autistic behavior, lining up objects. The first picture is of the letters from a scrabble game, the second picture is of furniture lined up beside lego pieces.

Portraits

   

These two photographs are the only two pictures that contain a central image focused on a person, without being prompted. The most obvious thing about these pictures is that neither one displays a face. This might imply that this is similar to the way that autistic individuals view themselves and other people. It is common for autistic individuals to not make direct eye contact when communicating with others and often avert their eyes, so it makes sense that, when taking pictures, autistic individuals wouldn't include eyes. These particular pictures even go so far to completely not include a large portion of the face.

Prompted Photograph

After being prompted, this Autistic individual took a picture of a staff member at the disability service center he attended. None of the other pictures taken included a face prominently featured, which makes this photograph unique. Although the picture includes a person and a face it is interesting that the picture still includes lots of the little details in the enviornment others may have ignored. For example, all of the plates of food on the table are included in the picture.

 

It is common that when a typically developing individual takes a picture of a person they will take close ups and focus primarily on the face. In this case the individual chose to include the details as well. This may be another implication to how autistic individuals view the world. There may be some sense of concentrating on details instead of the overall, big picture of things. For instance, an autistic person, at first glance, may notice the stack of black cookies in the bottom left hand corner and pay not attention to the person in the back, whereas most people would first notice the person. This might have to do with how we are trained to value the importance of people and faces over objects as part of social interaction, which Autistic individuals do not have.

Artistic Ability?

      

      

It is often thought that autism brings with it an absence of artistic ability. It is common that Autism brings an element of robotic copying that may mimic art, but is usually dismissed as memorized imitation. Mny of these photographs are ideas that may seem to be reminiscent of professional photography. Part of this may be the attention to details phenomonon, which would cause autistic indivuals to fixate on interesting images. In this case, the circular structure of the monkey bars,viewed at the right angle, makes for a very interesting image. An image, that was worth taking a picture of.

This may raise questions as to the capacity of the Autistic mind. The majority of these photos were taken by an extremely autistic, virtually non-verbal individual. With literally zero training on how to take artistic pictures, these photographs seems to capture images that are artistic in an abstract sense. If art can be defined culturally, then could it be that the autistic mind is prevented from being "artistic" because it cannot understand cultural values? This would be a subtle difference to the idea that the autistic mind is not one of creativity. This subtle difference would put an entirely different perspective on the mind of autism.

Stimming

      

      

These pictures clearly display typical self stimulating behavior observable in Autistic spectrum disorders. The top photos were all taken within the same time frame. This individual loves to fold his hands in the fashion pictured above and view it dilligently from different angles. These pictures offer a unique version of what he is seeing. The last picture is a close up of his finger, although it seems to be very strange, he must have enjoyed the way it looks.

The second row of photographs was taken by an individual with PDD an Autistic spectrum disorder. The interesting thing here is that this individual took the majority of his photographs looking down towards his feet. The repetitive nature of feet striding and landing may have been what inspired him to take these pictures.