I Love You One Hundred

I’m currently working on a photobook to show life through my child’s eyes who was diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum when we moved to New York in 2012. I’m showing the way I believe Gabriel sees, approaches and comprehends the world around him. I want to reveal the elegance of his personality through the photographs we compose together as well as through the pictures he and I take alone. I want to show his childhood.

His vision is, like everyone else’s unique, and perhaps because of his age and the ways we have tried to protect him, there is a distinctly abstract, poetic nature to that vision. There is a music to his gestures, in the way he holds his head, turns his body, gathers his attention. That music, depending on the circumstances, plays louder or softer in comparison to a neurotypical child, like his brother, and often, after even a brief moment with him, it’s impossible not to feel touched, pushed to some mysterious emotional edge. 

I’m representing that seemingly ineffable, mysterious quality that Gabriel provokes through his gestures and gaze with photographs that are conceptual, abstract, and also realistic in their depiction. When a highly regarded speech therapist on the Upper East Side of Manhattan concluded when Gabriel was 6 that “he doesn’t process language” I understood that the limits of language ran both ways. There was, perhaps, only so much that Gabriel could understand through language, but it was equally true that there was only so much that language could do to express Gabriel’s unique way of experiencing and transforming reality. 

At that time, I would ask every day Gabriel: “Gabriel, do you know how much I love you?”

And every day he would answer: 

“-Good.”

“-Come on Gabriel, I don’t love you good, how much do I love you?”

“-Five.”

“-What?? Five?? Do you mean five? What do you mean by five? Why not ten?” 

“Mmmh ... I mean, one hundred.”

So I Love You One Hundred became one of the working titles for this Photobook.