Observation
This entry is about my on-going work exploring my neurodivergence. Click here to read all of the posts on this topic.
An old housemate once said to me “I love the way that you look at things. It’s like you are always seeing things as if you’ve just seen them for the very first time.”
Recently I had been thinking about why photography came so easily to me over other creative mediums as a young person, and my relationship to sight, observation, and if I’m honest, my hyper-vigilance. Her annoying voice came back to me.
I have always noticed the things that others allow to go unseen. I always situate myself in environments so that I can see everything unfolding and that are close to exits. I hear conversations that are at risk of tipping into confrontations and I sense when it is time to leave. I witness events unfold that others are unaware of because I am constantly visually engaged with the world around me. I also see moments and glimmers of beauty that exist within our fast changing world that too often pass others by.
I am intensely and visually observational of the world because it tethers me to the reality of the here and now as an antidote to when I have experienced dissociation from reality.
It makes sense that photography was the medium that I was attracted to as a young person. I have always needed and wanted constant stimulus. I cannot stand the same image in front of my eyes. It is boring and boredom is physically painful for me. I feel despair when I am static. I need constant, unending novelty.
In those earlier years of my crises, photography provided an opportunity for me to see differently and to learn new ways of accessing and creating an infinite unfolding stimulus. These days it has slowed down, and for a while, it became less of a focus. Recently I’ve become interested in questioning the role that photography and observation - learning to see, unsee, see differently - has played in my life as someone with late diagnosed ADHD.
It makes sense to me, given my impatience and constant desire for newness to create images, that I would lean into photography - where every step, every twist and bend of my body unlocks a new perspective.
These images are Polaroid self portraits submerged in and degraded by Lisdexamfetamine (my ADHD stimulant medication).