Autism is one of those disorders that seems to characterize an era. The etiology of the disease is poorly understood, its diagnosis imprecise, its treatment frequently conjectural. But one thing is sure: Autism is common. According to the Autism Society of America’s website, one in 150 children suffers it, while those in the United States diagnosed within the broad spectrum of this neuropsychiatric disorder is estimated at around 1.5 million.
Isaac Mintz, now in his early 30s, is part of that statistic.
Nineteen years ago, when he was 15, he underwent surgery for spinal
scoliosis. His father, photographer Charles J. Mintz, bought a Polaroid
Spectra and gave it to Isaac as a tool to help him understand and come
to terms with the hospital and the changes in his back. (People with
autism often have difficulty understanding changes in their
environments.) Soon Isaac was using the camera to organize his social
world. In two decades, he has produced hundreds of photographs of
family and friends, meticulously labeling each shot in a legible round
hand.
The Album Project, now on view at architect Robert Maschke’s
1point618 Gallery, features 17 images of Isaac taken by his father with
a large-format camera, mostly during family holidays. In them, Isaac
holds his photo albums open at waist level to display the pictures
inside. Dressed T-shirts, shorts and athletic shoes, he is shown
isolated against a pure white background, as if to say these clothes,
this body and the photographs are a world unto themselves, the spare
contours of an island self. In this respect, they resemble other series
of photographs by Mintz, like his views of Lake Erie or Venice Beach in
Los Angeles (check out his website, chuckmintz.com), which sometimes use
infrared film to evoke psychological isolation. Such unsentimental
— even tough — poetics of alienation are part of the
vocabulary of contemporary art and the modern psyche in general. It
seems especially appropriate to convey how autism feels to someone who
has it.
Most of the photos at 1point618 are large — and one, printed
on a screen mounted on a massive wooden panel, is huge. All show Isaac
in essentially the same pose over an almost 20-year period. Looking
more closely, you can see changes. Isaac’s expression becomes more
self-possessed, his resemblance to his father more pronounced. Together
they speak of Isaac’s growth and the usefulness of the Polaroid to that
process of maturation. But most of all, they describe the monolithic
size of the role that Isaac plays in his father’s life. Though
inflected with unusual difficulties in this particular case, that’s the
way it is for almost everyone: If parents are giants to their children,
the kids also are colossal in their parents’ minds, looming larger year
by year. In this way, there is a rare universality in Mintz’s
photographs.
This article appears in Jul 1-7, 2009.