Aspergers and the blank stare in childhood photos

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pensieve
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11 Apr 2011, 8:39 pm

Exhumed wrote:
My eyes are either closed or half-shut due to the camera flash in almost every picture, don't any of you have that? Every time I get a picture taken, my eyes are closed for the first few shots, then my eyes are half-open for one and the photographer gets frustrated and says "That's good enough."

Up until recently I'd have a hostile-looking half smile in every picture, until I realized I needed to spread my cheeks wider to smile properly.

I used to do that a lot. Now my eyes are wide open and take the full blast of the flash.

My default face for every photo is now eyebrows raised and lips raised on on side in a smirk.


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Jarax
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08 Nov 2013, 6:42 pm

The blank stare strikes again! It bothers me because it goes away when I'm socializing in a group, but when I am directly talking to someone, my eyes start to fade into the distance :/



SirReality
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08 Nov 2013, 9:40 pm

I looked off in my childhood photographs because I would be expressionless and then smile when I was told to. Nothing changed except for my mouth.



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09 Nov 2013, 12:00 am

The pics I have seen of myself between the ages of two and five have that blank stare. Before the age of almost two, my pics were very normal. It is very noticeable during that age range though in most of my pics. But after that age I seemed to be much more engaged in pictures and my pics look normal for the most part. There were some blank stare pics as an older kid but not nearly as many as when I was very little.


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09 Nov 2013, 12:05 am

pineapple wrote:
On a bulletin board next to the computer, there's this photo strip of 4 pictures of my mom and me. I'm maybe 3 years old. My mom is looking at the camera and making all these different expressions, but I'm either looking down or staring blankly. Looking at those pictures, I'm amazed that my mom never considered there was something "different" about me. When she found the strip, she was telling me how cute she thought it was. But I don't know. I just thought it was sad, because it was so hard being an undiagnosed child on the autistic spectrum, but the signs were everywhere.
I wonder too how my signs were missed. They seem so obvious when I go back and look at pics and see how my behavior and habits developed as a child. But Autism was not really known then and Asperger's and Autism Spectrum did not even exist and Misophonia was so rare it had no name and no one knew it existed then either so I guess I can't blame my parents for not understanding or realizing something was very off about me.


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09 Nov 2013, 12:28 am

I looked through a lot of photos I appeared in as a kid, and while I didn't really exhibit the blank stare in many of them, I was often oblivious of what was going on.



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09 Nov 2013, 9:55 am

No blank stare in photos - I learned to fake a nice smile at an early age because mom told me what to do with my face. However, I couldn't fake NT motion, so watching myself in childhood videos is downright painful. You could tell something wasn't right. Thank God I grew out of most of that.



LucySnowe
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09 Nov 2013, 11:36 am

My mom used to take a lot of candid photos of me, where I wasn't aware that my picture was being taken, and i would do this a lot--often in photos I'm looking off to the side, as if I'm staring through something and not at it.



Jensen
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09 Nov 2013, 2:58 pm

I just looked through some photos of a lively, interested baby. No blank stare. Later, from 4 years I am less fond of photographers and tend to look away. At the first school picture I smile, but look like an excuse for myself. I remember how I shrunk.
All later pictures are gone. Thrown out, - by me.


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Jarax
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09 Nov 2013, 11:59 pm

There was one situation where my expression froze for three to four seconds face to face with a friend, and if someone had taken a picture it would look like I was staring into space..funny thing is..this never happened to me in high school, or in middle school, in all those years everything was fine, but in this one situation I completely zoned out and gave the wrong impression :oops: