In 2001, when Sarah Mei Herman was twenty, her half-brother Jonathan was born. She had grown up an only child, imagining a sibling; by the time he arrived she was already an adult. Portraiture became one of the few means of reaching him. From the age of four, Jonathan was photographed regularly, often with their father, Julian, and the resulting body of work, made over more than twenty years, gives GOST Books’ Julian & Jonathan its long, unhurried arc: a boy’s visible passage into adulthood set against the slower weathering of the father and of Herman herself, as artist, daughter and half-sister.
Herman describes her interest as a triangulation — the shifting proximity and distance among three people, and the odd sensation of looking in on a world she does not fully belong to. Sometimes Jonathan sits with Julian; sometimes he is alone. He usually consented, and at other moments his resistance is plain. Most frames were made on medium-format film, a choice with consequences: father and son had to hold still, which pushed the sessions toward introspection, while Herman, working deliberately and at cost, slowed herself down. She sought calm, soft images in a restrained natural palette, clearing the frame of the superfluous while balancing staged arrangement against the room as found.
The book opens with Herman’s grandmother at the end of her life — the only other female figure in the project, and a hinge between generations. Intimacy here is presented not as documentary evidence but as something produced between sitter and photographer, dependent on trust and on a collaboration that includes the photographed. The sequencing lets change accumulate gradually rather than announce itself; it is the family’s attrition and loss, and the recurring attempt at closeness, that give the pictures their weight.
For collectors drawn to long-form familial portraiture, the book’s interest lies precisely in its duration and its restraint — a two-decade commitment by one photographer to a single, unresolved relationship, edited into book form rather than delivered as a retrospective statement.
