One of the first dementia patients Laurence Aëgerter met was in the later stages of the illness. She visited the man at a care facility in Switzerland to note his reactions to photographs she had brought along. As she showed him pictures and asked him to remark on them, he fluttered in and out of awareness, like a lamp flickering on and off, she said. For 10 minutes, the patient hardly said anything, struggling to articulate basic sentences. Then, Aëgerter showed him a photograph of a cat with her kitten, and something amazing happened. “He was able to speak for five minutes in a row,” said Aëgerter, a French visual artist based in Amsterdam. “That image triggered something very deep in him, a very deep memory that made him feel so strong. In those minutes, it was like he had no disease at all.”
A photographic treatment for people with dementia
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