My cousin Sana is twenty-seven. She lives with severe non-verbal autism in Turkey, cared for entirely by her parents, my aunt Nausheen and uncle, with no institutional support and no reprieve. I have spent nearly three years photographing her world: the domestic routines, the small negotiations, the hours that don't resolve into anything dramatic because caregiving rarely does.
For most of that time I was an observer standing just outside her experience. Somewhere in the middle of it, that distance closed, not through choice but through recognition. I began to understand certain things about attention, about overwhelm, about a mind that works differently, from the inside rather than across a lens.
Sana loves music in a house where music is not supposed to be loved. She plays it anyway, unbothered by what she is not meant to want. Care, in this family, has never meant agreement, and faith has never meant certainty. Someone once offered Nausheen an explanation for her daughter that had nothing to do with love. Nausheen did not accept it.
There is a tendency in photography to turn disability into either tragedy or inspiration. I am trying to avoid both, and instead stay with the ordinary weight of a household organised around one person's needs.
