In 1972, 29-year-old journalist Geraldo Rivera filmed an expose revealing the atrocities inside Willowbrook School, a state-supported institution on Staten Island for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Children whose only crimes lay in looking and acting slightly different from their nondisabled peers were sentenced to life in a filthy, reeking room where they huddled naked on the floor in their own feces or rocked and howled in terror or sat slack-jawed and vacant-eyed day after day while a single staff member tried to attend to the basic needs of 50.
Contrast these images with a recent New York Times photo of Rachel Handlin, 30, resplendent in a black lace top and smiling beside the field camera she used to shoot photos for her solo exhibition “strangers are friends I haven’t met yet” at New York City’s White Columns Gallery. In May 2024, Handlin became the first person with Down syndrome to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree.
