For ten years Julian Slagman photographed his two younger brothers, Mats and Jonah, as they moved through childhood into adolescence. That long attention gives Looking at My Brother its particular weight. The book, Slagman’s first monograph, gathers work in which the brothers hug and wrestle, swim and run, pose for close studies or fill the frame unaware. The moods shift — pensive, playful, wild, serene — and the sequence keeps returning to bodies in change.

The subject is not only brotherhood but time, and the way a photograph both marks and interrupts it. Slagman writes of the shutter blacking out the viewfinder at the moment of exposure, and of the image cutting through time “like a doctor sealing a wound.” The figure of surgery also has a literal counterpart here: Mats’s scoliosis operation left scars, and the book attends to the body’s vulnerability alongside the resilience both brothers carry. Across the decade recorded, a child becomes a teenager and a teenager becomes an adult.

Disko Bay publishes the book as an embossed printed hardcover of 120 pages, with 68 black-and-white and colour images and an English text by Linda Baumgartner translated by Jennifer Russell; the design is by Louis Montes. The Fotobus Library Award and a nomination for the Swedish Photo Book Award in 2025, together with the Aenne Biermann Prize in 2021, indicate the regard the project has attracted without settling what it means.

For collectors, the case rests on sustained authorship rather than novelty. This is a body of work built slowly within a family, edited into a book by a publisher committed to photography in book form — the kind of project whose coherence and restraint tend to matter more with time.