Timothy Archibald’s Echolilia

“I knew he was tuned differently, and I needed to build a bridge, get inside his head, learn what made him tick.’’ – photographer Timothy Archibald on his son Eli (above), on today’s Lens blog.

For a while I’ve been wanting to post something about Timothy Archibald’s Echolilia after coming across it this summer when I began work on a story about a young woman with Asperger’s syndrome.

Today Lens has posted a a story about how Archibald collaborated with his first son, Eli, who is autistic,”in formal shooting sessions that rarely lasted more than 5 or 10 minutes but were regularly scheduled and initiated by an object or notion that interested Eli.”

Archibald’s wife, Cheri, initially wasn’t too sure about the project. Jane Gross writes:”She worried that Eli was being exploited to serve her husband’s need to make sense of his own suffering. Eventually, however, Mr. Archibald said (Cheri) grew enthusiastic as she saw Eli’s pleasure in the work and the results.”

On Alison McCreery’s Photographers on Photography blog, the photographer explains the title.

For me, I wanted a title that people would approach without any previous baggage…something no one would know what it meant, but they could kind of figure it out by the sound. My word, ECHOLILIA, sounded like “echo” and sounded like a pretty flower “lily” and those two things summed it up for me. In medical books about Autism, the word “echolailia” appears, which refers to this type of verbatim copying of sounds and sentences. I liked the actual meaning because it reminded me of what I was doing: copying my kid, copying his stuff, photography is like copying something…it could go on and on. And I liked the meaning one would guess at, even if they didn’t know what it meant.

Related links:

Look inside the book
Feature Shoot Q&A, Sept. 10, 2010
Discover magazine’s Inside the Brain/T.A. blog, Sept. 27, 2010