Conceptual nominee

I’m working on a photobook to show life through my son’s eyes. He was diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum when we moved to New York three years ago. I’m showing the way I believe he sees, approaches and comprehends the world around him. I want to reveal his abstract and poetic vision and the elegance of his personality through the conceptual, abstract, and also realistic photographs we compose together or through the pictures he and I take alone. When a highly regarded speech therapist on the Upper East Side concluded last year that “Gabriel doesn’t process language” I understood that the limits of language ran both ways. There was, perhaps, only so much that Gabriel could understand through language, but it was equally true that there was only so much that language could do to express Gabriel’s unique way of experiencing and transforming reality. Everyday I ask Gabriel: “Gabriel, do you know how much I love you ?” And everyday he will answer: “-Good”. “-Come on Gabriel, I don’t love you good, how much do I love you?”. “-Five.” “-What ? Five? So why not ten?” “-Eh .. I mean Up to the sky!”
“Up to the Sky” could be the title for this book.

Anne-Emmanuelle Robicquet was born in Bordeaux in 1972. After accomplishing her master in Chinese Literature in Shanghai, she settled in Paris and worked for more than a decade to the Publisher Albin Michel. She moved to New York in 2012, with her husband Dinaw Mengestu and their two children. In class at the International Center of Photography, she is working on a Photobook about her son diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum when he turned 3 years old.