Photobook Review: Looking At My Brother by Julian Slagman

Looking At My Brother is a story of three brothers. The eldest is the photographer, and author of this book, next comes Mats, and then there’s the youngest Jonah, each growing up ‘in a world of their own’.

It’s a beautiful book where each boy takes on a different role as they career through the ages, a portrait of Mats opening the book, suds on his face, eyes closed, lips red, tendrils of hair smeared across his forehead. It’s a picture from the bathroom, the first of several in the book, and it comes with a tenderness and a willingness to be photographed that will leave him in the upcoming years.

Next up are more images of Jonah as he gets older, loose-limbed and wiry, a pre-adolescent dancing in the spray of the garden hose, checked shorts hanging over his thighs, the sunlight glinting over his stretched torso. Images of Mats follow, squatting on the ground, his mouth buried in his stretched out upper arm, slashes of scars curving up his back. Here is the awkwardness of youth compounded by scoliosis, the scars we see the first of a series he will bear in the course of surgery he receives for the condition.

Then we see the younger brother Jonah, the flesh full on his young face, his arms hidden beneath a dinosaur pyjama top. His legs are folded too, bare on the mattress of the bed, his face thoughtful, in deep contemplation of what is to come. I remember thinking that when I was young, 8 years old or so, wondering what it would be like to be 13 years old, how old boys of that age looked, how difficult it would be to bear the responsibilities of such advanced year.

My daughter thought that too, but also wondered when she was 6 at how old she was, how mature she was no longer being a child of 4, how grown-up she felt. That realisation of age, that understanding of what it is to be a person, a very young person, is at the heart of the photography in this book.

There is a tension between being young and being old, a sensation of time stretching out before you. Age is like the weather, you can experience multiple ages in any one day, no matter what your age. The fragility, the vulnerability of youth can transform to the confidence and certainty of young adulthood from a glance, an encouraging word, or a realisation, a sudden understanding of you and others are, of your place in the world. And the vitality, imagination, and child energy of childhood can dissipate in an instant for the same reasons. Betrayal is around the corner at every moment, the understanding that you might not be somebody's first priority, that you are on your own, alone in the world. The flip side is that love is also around the corner at every moment (if you are lucky as Jonah and Mats are), and the understanding that there are people who will do everything they can for you, who will give up their lives for you, that you are not alone.

The fluidity of age is apparent in the book as the boys grow older, as they enter their own worlds but then reconnect through images of the two holding hands across a tree, the younger lifted over the shoulders of the elder, as they play in the shadows of a European summer.

And as they age, Mats undergoes more surgery. We see trainlines of surgical tape running up the scar along his spine, we see him on crutches, we see him healed and ready to take on the world. We feel the weight of his struggles between the pages, and that flux between exhaustion, despair, and self belief and resilience.

The book ebbs and flows between the ages and then it ends almost as it begins, with a picture of Mats when he was younger in the bathroom, half his face is blacked out. It’s photographed on film maybe, the flash didn’t sync perhaps, we don’t know. It’s a picture that shows a person who’s not quite there, who’s become someone else, who possibly was never the person he thought he was in the first place.

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Looking At My Brother by Julian Slagman is published by Disko Bay Books

Embossed printed hardcover
17 × 22,7 cm
120 pages
68 b&w and color images
Text in English by Linda Baumgartner translated by Jennifer Russell
Edition of 750
ISBN 978-87-973526-9-4

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Julian Slagman (b.1993, Hamburg) is a German-Dutch photographer currently living and working in Stockholm. He studied photography at Neue Schule für Fotografie in Berlin, HfbK Hamburg and HDK-Valand in Gothenburg under Eva Maria Ocherbauer, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin and Anna Strand & Annika von Hausswolff. He has exhibited series of works in Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Paris Photo and around Europe including Berlin, Frankfurt, Friedrichshafen, Copenhagen and Gothenburg. Looking At My Brother was awarded the Aenne Biermann Prize in 2021 and shortlisted for the Carte Blanche Students Prize sponsored by Paris Photo.

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer and lecturer based in Bath, England. His next online courses begin in September, 2024. More information here. Follow him on Instagram