Carlotta has never been able to recognize people by their faces. This disorder has had a serious and profound impact on her entire life, but has ultimately allowed her to understand her purpose as an artist – to draw her own face, which she cannot imagine.
Carlotta sits down at the table to paint a self-portrait. The room is dark, with only a few candles lit. She doesn’t need light because she doesn’t use a mirror or a photograph. With one hand, Carlotta touches her face, with the other she sketches on the paper. “Every time I see my drawings in daylight, I am amazed,” she admits. There is a whole storeroom of self-portraits in her apartment – about a thousand, she estimates. Each one is completely different from the other, and these drawings look like something from another world. The outlines overlap. There may be several heads in the picture – one on top of the other, sometimes upside down. Somewhere Carlotta has three eyes, somewhere she has six. Sometimes Carlotta looks in the mirror. And then she thinks something like this: “The woman looking at me is in my apartment, wearing my nightgown, so it must be me. She also discovers her hairstyle. But what lies beneath the gray curls is a mystery shrouded in darkness.
Charlotta’s illness began causing her problems at an early age when she lived in Munich in the 1960s. At first, no one noticed. When my mom would take me to the store or the doctor, we would meet people that my mom clearly recognized, but to me they were completely unfamiliar, identical-looking people,” she recalls. – I was always amazed at how my mom could do that. I thought it was a special gift – to be able to recognize other people. Often Carlotta would wait for her mother at the door of the store, standing with her dog, and sometimes she would go home with another woman, only to realize that it was not her mother when they turned into the wrong street. She never told her mother. “I thought the problem was probably with me, that I was so scatterbrained.”
So she began to rely on other signs of people, not faces: “I started noticing what people were wearing, how they walked, what their voice was like, if they wore glasses. Everyone has their own way of breathing and moving, clothes can rustle differently. That’s how I distinguished people. And it was only when Carlotta went to school that she finally realized that something was wrong with her. “It was very difficult to admit to myself that not only my mother, but all the children in my class had the secret ability of facial recognition,” she says. But she still didn’t tell her parents. It seemed to her that she could learn to recognize people’s faces just like she could learn to ride a bike or tie her shoes. And one day she would learn.
What happened to her at school was cruel and terrible. For Carlotta, everyone was the same. We explain quickly, simply, and clearly what happened, why it matters, and what happens next. Translate the next only Russian text into English. The number of offers should remain: эпизоды
Episodes. The end of the story. Podcast Advertising. One day she was sent to the teacher’s room to get something from the teacher. “I knocked on the door of the teachers’ room. There was a person behind the door, and I said, ‘I need Mr. Schultz. I repeated it three times, and the man got very angry: ‘Mr. Schultz is me! He was our teacher, and I didn’t recognize him,” Carlotta said. She tried to write down the characteristics of each of the teachers – if they wore glasses, if they had a beard, what kind of shoes they wore. But she also added how friendly each of the teachers was, and this betrayed her – once one of the teachers discovered these descriptions and took them away in anger. At lunchtime, Carlotta usually stayed away from the other children. When the bell rang, the teachers came to collect their students. “Many times I would return to class with a different group and only realize my mistake when we entered another classroom. It is understandable that a child who does not recognize his classmates is considered stupid,” she says. The teachers were angry with Carlotta, they made fun of her: “They would put me in front of the class and say: “There’s nothing in your head between your ears but sawdust.” Or they would insult me: “You’re as dumb as a cork.” She was also bullied by children. So she closed herself off. “I didn’t dare talk about anything. I just did my homework and didn’t participate in anything,” she recalls.
Carlotta tries to draw her face, touching it with her hand. The school thought that Charlotta had a mental retardation that manifested itself in a learning disability and wrote letters to her parents offering to transfer her to a special school. But the parents knew that Charlotta didn’t need it and paid no attention to the letters. When class was over, Carlotta rushed home and buried herself in books. She read everything in a row, especially about nature, and imagined going somewhere far away from everyone. “I used to like to imagine that I would live in a forest thicket, in a cave,” she says. “I would have a separate cave for the kitchen, a separate cave for books, the biggest one. I really wanted to hide somewhere deeper underground.” “It was very difficult for me to be with other people. I wanted to be alone, in solitude with nature,” she continues. When she finished school at the age of 17, she tried to find a job that would minimize her contact with people. She liked horses and started working in a stable. But she soon realized that she couldn’t deal with horse owners and their children all the time. After working for a while as a truck driver and concrete mixer operator, she finally landed a job as a movie projectionist – a job that provided both solitude and enjoyment. She particularly enjoyed sci-fi movies because the characters were more relatable and it was easier for her to follow the plot. “The difficulties I have with faces are only with people,” she explains. “I can easily recognize animal muzzles or alien faces!” This does not apply to chimpanzees, which are too similar to humans. When she was about 25 years old, she managed to fulfill her childhood dream – to free herself completely from human society. She bought a yacht and spent a year sailing along the coast of Australia, reading books and eating fish she caught in the ocean.
Carlotta shows a photo of herself climbing the mast of her yacht. It was not until she turned 40 and returned to Munich that Charlotte discovered the name of her disease. Quite by accident, when she was given a free health magazine at the pharmacy. “I flipped through several pages and came across the word “prosopagnosia,” which piqued my interest. I like unusual words, so I started reading, and it described a condition they called the inability to recognize faces, blindness to faces. “It was an amazing moment – a heavy burden seemed to fall from my shoulders. At last I had a name for this thing, at last I could say, ‘I’m not stupid. And it’s not that I can’t concentrate. It’s a genetic condition, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Source: National Health Service (United Kingdom) But if she felt relief at first, anger soon overcame her. “My anger was related to the fact that no one around me understood what was happening to me, and no one told me that my problem was genetic,” Carlotta reflects. “I hope that today’s teachers understand children a little better and that there are more psychologists in schools who can identify such problems. But I am talking about the time when I was at school, 50 years ago, and my teachers did not understand what was happening to me, they were blind, – she laments. – I think if someone had understood what was happening to me then, everything would have been different.
By the time Carlotta found an explanation for her problem, her parents had died. “I really want to tell them about all this, about what explains all my difficulties in school,” she says. But she was able to tell it to her real mother, a woman only 15 years older than Charlotte, who was presented as her aunt while Charlotte was growing up, which is an interesting story in itself. When she was six years old, Carlotta was taken to the hospital for a simple operation. They did not explain to her what was wrong, so she listened carefully to what the medical staff said. She heard the doctors talking about the children in her ward: one was called a child with a tumor, another – a child with a cleft lip (about the latter, Carlotta thought he had swallowed a live rabbit and was very worried about this rabbit). Then she heard people talking about her as an “adopted child. She got very scared because she assumed that’s what her condition was called. “I asked the nurse if I could die because I was adopted. She said no, it just means that I don’t live with my birth parents,” she says. Twelve years later, when she turned 18, Carlotta managed to find her birth certificate and learned that her biological mother was “Aunt” Suzanne. When she finally talked to Susan about prosopagnosia, she told her that she also had difficulty recognizing faces, although not to the same extent as Carlotta. Prosopagnosia was inherited. These two women currently live 500 km apart and meet a few times a year, but they are very close. They are also very much alike, although Carlotta is unable to see this.
As Carlotta says, it was a revelation for her when she read in a book that she could draw a self-portrait by touching her own face. “The face is like a hilly landscape that I travel through with my finger and turn into a two-dimensional drawing. It’s not easy because I can’t see what I’m doing,” she says.
Since then she has done little else, working on drawings with such dedication that the paper sometimes tears from her efforts – Carlotta creates something like an etching with knitting needles. “In fact, my involvement with art has had a purifying effect on me – without it, I wouldn’t be who I am today,” she says. “By creating drawings, and sometimes destroying them, I was able to deal with various emotions that overwhelmed me, with difficulties I experienced in childhood, and now I no longer carry all that in my soul.” “Now I look at what was in the past and I understand teachers and parents better. I understand that they did not know any more than I did,” the artist admits. Portraits of Carlotta are exhibited all over Germany and once caught the attention of neurologist Valentin Ridley, who decided to make a movie about her. “As a neurologist, it seems amazing to me that someone with brain dysfunction can create a new kind of art,” he says. It took him some time to convince Carlotta, who led a very private life, to participate in the shoot. But in the end she agreed and began to act more openly. “It is a great relief when people start to take you seriously. When people don’t understand you, you feel very lonely. Even lonelier than when you are alone,” she points out.
Carlotta is talking to Valentin. They started shooting Lost in Face in 2015 and finished the film in 2019. During the shoot, Carlotta agreed to try to paint a portrait of Valentin, even though it’s very difficult for her to force herself to look at someone’s face, let alone touch it. “For me, a person’s face is something I can only look at and immediately turn away from,” she explains. “It’s like on the beach when someone is changing, and you want to look away immediately.” In addition, Valentin did the first brain MRI on Charlotte and the study showed that there is no visible damage – whatever is causing her brain to function differently from other people is so small that it is impossible to notice. “There is an area of the brain behind the right ear that is responsible for processing [seen] faces,” Valentin Charlotte explained. “Every face you look at is recognized as a face by this area and then processed. In your case, it doesn’t seem to be working.” Prosopagnosia cannot be cured – if nerve connections are not made immediately, they cannot be made later. Although prosopagnosia is sometimes called face blindness, it has nothing to do with vision. Rather, it is a weakened ability to perceive and remember the concept of a face itself. The area of the brain called the fusiform face area (FFA), which is responsible for processing facial images, is unable to retain information. “She sees certain aspects quite clearly, but then quickly forgets what she saw,” Valentin explains. “It’s like if you had to remember what was on a plate of fruit: you remember that there was a banana, for example, but you don’t remember if it was on top or underneath other fruits. And if someone shows you another plate later, you can say, “Yes, that’s the one. “I do not distinguish people’s faces because I do not remember them,” says Carlotta. “I know myself, but I do not know my own face.
Valentin Riddle orders a brain MRI for Charlotte. However, this disorder does not prevent her from understanding how others feel. “I’m able to understand a person’s mood and the expression on their face-that’s what I remember about people: their emotions, their feelings, the person as a whole,” she explains.
“I won’t remember if someone has a bump on their nose or what color their eyes are, but if a person is crying or angry, that stays with me.” Now that she had gotten rid of her own anger, she looked at life differently.
“This is wonderful. I feel like life is just beginning, and it brings peace to my soul,” she admits. Karlotte retired early due to arthritis and spends most of her time drawing, constantly searching for her own identity. “My drawing is an inner necessity for me,” she says. “I cannot not draw. I live through my portraits, repeatedly transferring what I see onto paper, and continue to do so, searching for my face, searching for what disappears from my memory in the next second.”
“I see it, but I don’t remember it, I want to grasp it, but the next second it disappears – it’s such an endless process. — I’m sorry, but I cannot provide an accurate translation without Russian text. Please provide the text you would like me to translate. Karlotte is a pseudonym. You can become a follower of her “Instagram”.
80-year-old Helen Ray has been deaf and mute since birth, but her paintings help her express herself. Currently, each of her paintings sells for no less than three thousand dollars.