One of the central features of autism is difficulty with communicating and forming relationships with other people. Simply meeting someone's gaze in a greeting can be overwhelming and cause enormous anxiety. 

As a photographer with autism, I embarked on the project "You, Me and Autism", which challenged characteristics of my condition in a surprising and direct way, through portraiture. 

On one level my work introduces the audience to a range of autistic individuals from the North East and offers a timely reminder that more than one in a hundred people, of all ages, abilities and backgrounds, are living with the condition. On a deeper level, there is the underlying and almost paradoxical situation of people with autism dealing with the intense scrutiny of formal portraiture.

All good portraits are multi-layered collaborations between the artist and the subject, but it is the additional layers of "autistic" participation (on both sides of the camera) that makes "You, Me and Autism" particularly unique.