This manifesto began privately—as a way to unlearn shame and name what I hadn’t yet dared to speak: that my process, my pace, and my preferences are not failings. They are forms of knowledge. Writing this is not just for the viewer, though I hope it offers context. It’s a reckoning with myself, a reframing of what I once saw as limitations.
I make work from the margins—psychological, physical, aesthetic. My art exists in a tension: between documentary and narrative, form and fracture, visibility and erasure. That tension is not aesthetic flourish. It is lived experience.
I am autistic—low-support-needs and largely invisible. That invisibility permeates everything. It’s in how I move through public space, how I process sensory input, how I work. It’s also in how I’ve been told what counts as real making.
For years, I absorbed the art world’s unspoken rules: that digital work is lesser. That real texture must be manual. That legitimacy requires certain tools, certain gestures, a visible “struggle” that performs labor in accepted ways. I internalized this and turned it against myself. I shamed my process. I silenced my output.
A late diagnosis ruptured that. It forced a re-evaluation. What I once saw as deficits—short working memory, difficulty with improvisational overload—are now part of my method. My aesthetics are shaped not just by taste, but by neurology. My “limitations” are a kind of authorship.
I don’t photograph in manual mode. I pre-calculate settings. I shoot in aperture priority with fast instincts and learned intuitions. My fashion images happen because I build conditions in which I can thrive—automating certain decisions so I can focus on others. This isn’t a lack of skill.
It’s a technique.
It’s adaptation.
It’s a neurodivergent method.
When I use iPhones, toy cameras, or point-and-shoots, it’s not a fallback. It’s radical intent. These tools let me meet the moment. They democratize. They defy hierarchies that punish the disabled, the broke, the unseen. I’ve shot editorial spreads on phones. I’ve made gallery work with plastic lenses. I’ve found beauty in the tools I was told were lesser.
I process digitally. I use Lightroom presets. Sometimes Photoshop. Sometimes even phone apps. This, too, was once a source of shame—because real artists, I thought, suffered analog. But why must labor be visible to be valued? Why must texture be manual to be real?
A mentor once told me he liked my collage work—but that I had to redo it all manually. For texture. For legitimacy. For the look of the hand. That feedback echoed what I had already absorbed from the world. But also from artists I love.
Brian Eno said the limitations of a medium become its hallmark—that we push things to their breaking point, and that’s where innovation lives. Feedback. Grain. Glitch. All celebrated ruptures.
But for disabled artists, the rupture isn’t always aesthetic. It’s foundational. The medium itself can be the breaking point—or the lack of access to it. That, too, can be beautiful. That, too, is authorship.
I photograph liminal spaces and people—those in flux, in-between, on the threshold of one identity or reality and the next. I think it’s because autism often places me in that same liminal state: never fully in, never fully out. Always translating. Always transitioning.
I come from the theatre. I carry with me Peter Brook’s theory of the Rough and the Holy—the idea that performance (and by extension, image-making) can be raw, stripped of polish, and still radiate presence, urgency, even transcendence. I grew up with Antonin Artaud’s screams, Brecht’s distance, Moriyama’s shadows—images and moments torn from the edge of something unspeakable.
The rough is not a compromise. It’s a path. It confronts. It unmasks. It opens the sacred through the broken.
I want my work to feel like that: incomplete, haunted, honest. I want it to be unmastered and unmasterable—accessible, even vulnerable. I believe the art world’s unspoken hierarchy of materials, processes, and polish must be dismantled, or at least complicated—especially when those hierarchies silence disabled and marginalized voices.
This is not just aesthetic. It is philosophical.
My work is deeply postmodern in both ethic and style. I believe in pastiche, appropriation, ambiguity. I take from Barthes the death of the author; from Foucault, the shifting nature of subjectivity; from Deleuze, the idea of becoming.
I believe in ghosts, gaps, and glitches.
I believe in art that resists mastery.
I believe the means of making should be cracked open—not hoarded behind the veil of prestige.
To be disabled and invisible is to be asked constantly to prove one’s reality.
I am done proving.
I am making.
This is not an apology for how I work. It is a declaration.
To those who feel their work is less because of how they must make it: this is your permission. Not to explain. But to assert.
Anyone can cook.
Anyone can create.
The medium is not the message—you are.