A photographer’s intimate, decade-long portrait of his brothers

In Julian Slagman’s family, photography is an act of love. The German-Dutch photographer’s grandparents, Fritz and Sabine, travelled widely to shoot images for Fritz’s job as a landscape photographer; in their downtime, they took it in turns to stage photos of each other. “I have this idea that somehow they founded this idea of a relation between love and seeing. It was a relationship that was made by photography, in a sense,” Slagman says. “The camera became a bit like a member of the family.”

It was only natural, then, that Slagman would apply this connection to his own familial relationships. In his teens, he gained two younger brothers – Mats and Jonah – with whom he shared a mother, but not a father. His photo book, Looking at My Brother, is a decade-long chronicle of their relationship and originally began as a way to navigate this evolving family and find his own space within it. “I was learning how to become a photographer at the same time I was learning to be a brother,” he explains.

The book compiles around 65 of the thousands of images Slagman took of his brothers over the years, and captures the formative experiences of all three. Just as Mats and Jonah go from chubby-cheeked toddlers to long-limbed teens in baggy jeans and neat suits, Slagman’s photographic style undergoes a similar kind of evolution. “Almost every image is taken with a different camera,” he says, likening his use of different styles and mediums to a teenager experimenting with ever-changing fashion trends.

Many of the photographs detail the various treatments and surgeries Mats had to undergo to treat his scoliosis, a curvature of the spine. Throughout the book he is pictured on crutches, wearing a stark white medical corset, during the aftermath of an operation with stitches running the length of his back and later, when they have faded to purpling scars. The images are intimate and unflinching, refusing to either sensationalise or turn away from the more graphic elements of his condition. “We used photography to understand what was happening at that moment,” Slagman says. “It's like witnessing how someone is suffering.”

But with this focus on the body also comes an intense tenderness, especially when the images of scars and sutures are juxtaposed against more commonplace childhood scenes. In a particularly striking spread, a small child sits with his arms tucked inside a dinosaur t-shirt: on the next page, Mats is similarly constrained by the medical corset used to try and straighten his spine. These fragmented moments feel like glimpses of the snapshots that make up a life, and contrasting the pain and mundanity is a deliberate choice on Slagman’s part. “I try to look at it a bit democratically. The bloody scars, for example – of course I remember being in the room looking at them at the first time, but that has the same importance as this image where he’s whispering to our mum in a restaurant, the same sort of fragility or softness about it. So for me, it’s not that one of these moments is more significant than another.”

Another decision Slagman made was to avoid a chronological retelling of their childhoods. “I really wanted to have these time gaps and these rough jumps in between,” he shares. “Sometimes you will see Mats looking at Jonah when they are maybe 16 years old, and then the next spread is six years earlier. And I really liked this kind of tension that gets created there. I like that it’s a little confusing, and that sometimes you’re not sure if you’re looking at Mats or Jonah.”

The result is a book that feels like a collection of jumbled, hazy memories, some of them half-forgotten or misremembered, rather than a precise timeline of events. We’re left wondering about the spaces in between the images: how the boys became youths and how the stitches healed into scars. It’s a reminder that even the most comprehensive photo albums can never capture the full story. “I think photography is quite brutal,” Slagman says, “because you’re always cutting out one tiny bit out of an entire thing.”

But even when that incision is made, it is transformed by what Slagman calls the “relationship between love and seeing”. By recording, as well as living through, the fleeting moments of his brothers growing up and the lasting impact of Mats’ pain, he becomes both observer and participant in the project. “The title is Looking at My Brother,” he says. “We specifically chose that and not Looking at My Brothers because it’s really this kind of triangle where Mats is looking at Jonah, Jonah is looking at me, I am looking at both of them and both of them are looking back at me. The direction of looking becomes a part of it, and you see how a relationship is built on looking.”