Fine Art photographer, Charles Mintz, makes a special visit to the B&H Event Space to deliver a lecture on his personal account with his relationship to his Autistic son, the hardships they endured, and overcame through photography. Charles will discuss how using a camera became a method of therapy and rehabilitation, which resulted in wonderful and poignant body of work called “The Album Project”. Charles will share images from the project and talk about the processes and collaborations that were performed to arrive at the acclaimed traveling exhibition and forthcoming Powerhouse published book.

The Album Project:

Around the time of his fifteenth birthday in 1990, our son Isaac developed a serious curvature of his spine. Isaac has autism – a limited ability to communicate. Surgery was recommended. In an attempt to help him understand the surgery, we bought him a Polaroid Spectra camera. We hoped to use it to show him what was happening to his back and to record the people and places he encountered around the surgery. Somewhat to our surprise, the camera became his constant companion at family events - a tool for him to order his world.

Using an 8x10 camera Isaac was photographed in roughly ten sessions in my studio producing 75 images. The process would begin with him and me going through an album and selecting two or three page pairs. This sort of decision-making is very difficult for him. He has a very limited non-verbal vocabulary. I had to coach him to change his expression in these pictures. His default is a forced grin he learned in kindergarten when the teacher insisted he “smile for the camera”.

This project is a record of Isaac and his photographs. It is a great success story for this young man as a survivor of his five-hour scoliosis surgery and, even more, his ability to overcome his limitations and build a life independent from his parents. The project is about telling your story with a limited palette – language, both verbal and written – body language – photographs. It is about the discomfort and frustration of using every tool you have and still not being understood.