Jessiena Lake
Photographer | Mixed-Media Artist
The Latest Photobook
The Latest is available for pre-order of signed first-edition copies sent by the artist starting October 20th, 2026.
The Latest is available for pre-order of signed first-edition copies sent by the artist starting October 20th, 2026.
This video tour features an earlier draft of The Latest; the final edition has since been revised and expanded to include essays.
I have been working on The Latest as a series and as a photobook for the last year, but I have been conceptualizing, crafting and gathering props for this series for 6 years, since I was awarded my diagnosis in 2020 at 39.
Last September I made the first image that had been stuck in my imagination for years and it was an overwhelming experience. Diving right into the project was too much, so I needed a more grounding entry point into the work and that’s when I created the Monochromatic Calibrations in January of this year. Gathering the items and arranging the calibrations felt meditative, like zen gardening. Calmly, carefully lining up items from my daily life and letting that experience ground me, made creating the symbolic still lifes and release images more accessible and once I started the images poured out of me.
It was incredibly healing to finally see the images I had been imagining on my computer screen. Some made me feel deep sadness, others made me feel immense joy, but creating these images helped let go of the past, let go of the overwhelm and start imagining a future where things might just work out and it gave me a present where I accept myself.
It’s been a very emotional journey from creating the first images, to printing them, holding them in my hand and laying them out. To printing the first half of the book on my home printer and flipping through its pages and then having that first half printed professionally and opening the box to see something I had created bound in such beautiful way. Laying the book out and writing the essays has stretched me and challenged me in ways I hadn’t expected and at many points has been very overwhelming, but ultimately it's been a healing journey.
Sharing a project this deeply personal is not something I take lightly or have navigated with ease, but it is something I have needed to do. I spent 39 years struggling with daily life, with connection, with people, with employment and with myself. A lack of representation of women and creatives in the autistic community and society at large, along with a lack of neutral information about autism, information that neither stigmatizes it nor presents it as a superpower, made understanding and accepting myself that much harder.
For better or worse, autism is a collection of traits that affects how autists interpret the world, our culture of communication, our sensory experiences and how we process and experience our emotions. That deserves representation.
There might be other late diagnosed autistic women who have created art projects about their late diagnosis, I haven’t found one yet and would like to, but there are late diagnosed women that have written books about their experience and I cherish them, reread them and am so glad they were brave enough to put their stories out there.
So this is me trying to be brave.
It is scary to share a book and a body of work that is so personal in a climate like this or at all, but representation matters. It can help someone begin making sense of a life that has never quite made sense. It can help us accept ourselves after a lifetime of feeling like too much and not enough, and of being told by the outside world that even when something feels right to us, we're somehow doing it all wrong.
The Latest is now available to preorder in both softcover and premium layflat editions.
The first edition is being offered as a signed preorder, with copies expected to begin shipping on October 20th, 2026.
