Ever since I was a boy I noticed that I seemed to see and experience things differently than most people around me. I seemed to be able to see patterns and details that other people couldn’t or wouldn’t see. I also noticed that I had more difficulty connecting with other people. There seemed to be rules of relationships and engagement that others knew intuitively but that were foreign and puzzling to me.
In my fifth decade I was diagnosed with a form of autism called Asperger’s Syndrome. With that, a great many of my life experiences and history made sense and fell into place like puzzle pieces.
Autism is known as a spectrum condition, that is, there is a set of defining characteristics such as difficulty in making eye contact, sensitivity to sound, sheer brilliance and genius, lack of social awareness, and many others. However, not everyone on the spectrum will display all of the characteristics. There is a saying in the community, that when you have met one person on the spectrum, you have met one person on the spectrum.
Temple Grandin, one of the most well known and accomplished autistic persons has said that we on the spectrum are like Martian anthropologists, we are placed here on Earth, and then we spend the rest of our time trying to figure out the the stupid rules. (She actually did not say "stupid", that was my addition ...)
Sometimes life has been very tough on the spectrum, but I would not trade it for anything. For me personally, the benefits and strengths have outweighed the challenges and difficulties. Besides, autism is not a disease that you have, like the flu or cancer. It is part of who you are. “Cure it”, and you will not longer be yourself, but somebody else completely.
With this project, I have tried to show what it feels like to be, to live on the spectrum, here on Earth.
It is my hope that this photo project may help parents of children on the spectrum visualize a bit more of their child’s inner life.
This instant that you are reading these words, has been in the future since the beginning of time. Now the moment has past, and will be in history for the rest of eternity. Our consciousness passes through much too quickly.
This series is nominally humorous speculations about what may happen in the future, but is really about how humanities ideas, beliefs and philosophies affect individual and collective behavior. I find it so interesting that ideas, something that has no physical existence, indeed, barely exists at all, drives all of humanities endeavors, for good or ill.
Will humanity construct a utopia? A dystopia? How could it tell?
As Yogi Berra said: “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future”.
This project attempts to capture the characteristics of pure light without the light reflecting off of an object and then being refracted through a lens.
For this project, I constructed a pinhole camera by making a pinhole in a sheet of aluminum foil and then mounting it to my digital mirrorless camera.
I then shone laser light directly through the pinhole onto the photoreceptor of the camera.
Another technique was to bounce the laser light off of a metallic surface directly onto the photoreceptor (sans pinhole).
These images capture nature in its purest, rawest form.
A couple of things to note:
You can see waves of the interference pattern in some of the images. This shows that light has a wave nature. If you look closely, the waves of the red light are wider than the green or blue light. This shows that color is directly dependent on the wavelength of the light.
However, in order for the photoreceptor to capture the light energy, it must have a particle nature as well, where all the light energy is concentrated in a single point.
These photos show the duality nature of light.
This gallery shows what happens when one building is reflected in another building and the windows are distorted because of the higher air pressure inside the buildings. The distortions remind one of Dada-ism, Surealism, Op-art, etc.
