- a failed attempt to photograph reality
16 × 23,5 cm
36 pages
Riso/Inkjet
Epilogue by Avi Bolotinsky
Limited Edition of 30 copies
Published 11th of April 2025
Design: Julian Slagman
- Looking at My Brother
Embossed printed hardcover
17 × 22,7 cm
120 pages
68 b&w and color images
Text by Linda Baumgartner translated by Jennifer Russell
Edition of 750
Published 10th of May 2024
Design: Louis Montes
- Jonah looking at Mats holding an airplane,
- Prague, 2012
mounted, signed & dated
Maple Frame, Artglass AR 70 Antireflex
Frame Size 300x400mm
Image Size 200x300mm
- Vergissmeinnicht
- Looking at My Brother
- written by Res
What Julian Slagman saw in his family albums was a little different in that he could see what the photographs couldn’t show. He explains, “both of my grandparents were photographers … when my grandmother accompanied my granddad on his trips through Germany, she would photograph him, focusing on him disappearing underneath the cloth.” He could see the photographer and the reverence for the act of photographing, and although Julian couldn’t always see what they were seeing, he inherited their deep dedication and love for looking and acknowledges the sharing of this role as foundational to his practice, stating “Their intimate relation, that they found through photography was perhaps what made me look at my brothers in a similar way.”
Julian was born in 1993 in Hamburg, Germany. Years later, after his mother remarried, his brother Mats was born in 2004 and the youngest Jonah in 2008. Julian was 15 years old when he began photographing and reflects, “I found myself in a great situation, of being a teenager, witnessing how a little boy is being brought up and raised in our society, while I was myself kind of still in that process too. The camera made me learn a lot about growing up.” We can see Julian coming of age behind the lens as he tries on different photographic approaches and experiments with different cameras as most teenagers do with styles of clothing or genres of music. As Julian ripens, we follow these boys blooming over the nearly 15 years of photographing, resulting in a collection of images that holds together and distills the wild, unpredictable, and often divergent processes of three evolving individuals circling each other as they move through time. Looking at my brothers, is a dedication to Mats and Jonah, as Julian asks both them and us, “to understand our vulnerability in relation to time.”
1 Peter Galassi, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, The Museum of Modern Art: Distributed by H.N. Abrams, 1991, p. 7
2 All quotes from a series of conversations held between Res and Julian Slagman in the spring of 2023 in Gothenburg, Sweden.
3 Konica Hexar AF, Leica M6, Leica M9, Leica S007, Sony Alpha 7r III, Fuji X100, Mamiya 7 II, Fuji GFX SII, Nikon FE2, Yashica Electro 35, Canon 5D M2, Fuji X-Pro 3, Rolleiflex 2.8F