Born from the Same Root is Tsai Ting Bang’s photobook, published as a handmade hardcover first edition of 100 numbered copies by Shuhezhi. Its 240 pages are bound as a gatefold book: the left side is dedicated to the photographer and the right side to his older brother, A-Hsien, so that a dividing seam separates them as the sequence proceeds. The design carries the argument rather than decorating it. Images move from childhood family photographs to the separate adult lives the brothers now lead, and each turn of the page restates both the distance between them and the origin they cannot shed.

Tsai, a largely self-taught photographer of Taiwanese-Vietnamese descent, photographs a relationship shaped by separation, rivalry and renewed care. His brother’s hospitalisation prompted him to recognise how little he understood of A-Hsien’s life. Photography became a way of attending to that distance, while also questioning his own desire to make an artwork out of someone else’s suffering.

The result is a documentary work about family and mental health in which the photographer remains implicated in what he shows. Tsai asks whether he is understanding his brother or turning him into a subject for his own ambitions. Childhood resemblance and diverging adult lives give the paired structure its force: the reader can compare two paths, but cannot make them interchangeable. Their shared history offers a connection without supplying a simple explanation for either life.

The book received the 2024 Paris Photo–Aperture First PhotoBook Award. For a collection, its interest lies in an autobiographical sequence that makes binding structure part of the family narrative. The original handmade edition preserves that intimate encounter in a deliberately limited physical form. Its divided pages ask readers to consider the limits of comparison and the responsibility involved in looking at someone close to the photographer.