Her brother was born when she was an adult. To feel closer to him, she picked up her camera

CNN

17-02-2025

When artist Sarah Mei Herman began photographing her father, Julian, and half-brother, Jonathan, she didn't realize it would become a two-decade-long body of work.
Take any family album or photos app and you are bound to see the passage of time play out as people come together over months or years to pose in front of the camera. Features change, relationships evolve and photographs become more vivid than memory.
But in 2005, when the Dutch artist Sarah Mei Herman began making portraits of her father, Julian, and her 4-year-old half-brother, Jonathan, two decades her junior, she wasn't thinking of the long view.
Jonathan was born to his mother, Eva, and Julian the year the photographer began her undergraduate studies in art. Sarah's parents had separated when she was young, and though she had secretly harbored a desire to have a sibling when she was younger, she was now entering adulthood and at a very different stage in her life.
'I grew up as a lonely child,' she told CNN in a phone call. 'I was always very close to both my parents separately, but I had no idea what it would feel like (to have a sibling).' Julian and Jonathan at their home in 2013. Julian and Jonathan in their garden in 2009. Jonathan lies in his room among his toys in 2009.
Her relationship with Jonathan wasn't what she expected. Seemingly worlds apart, he kept to himself — and often her at arm's length. 'He was very sweet, but he … was quite distant always, and he still is,' she explained. 'It was very hard to get close to him, and I realized later that's why I started to photograph him.'
Herman has continued to photograph him for more than 20 years, and in front of the camera he changes from a small, dark-haired boy who holds his father's hand to a pensive 23-year-old as Julian ages beside him. Her new book of the work, 'Julian & Jonathan,' is a triple portrait of their relationship to one another — as well as with Herman, who makes fleeting appearances but is always an unspoken presence.
Over the years, Herman has shown the work in gallery shows and at international festivals, including two forthcoming solo exhibitions at the Concertgebouw Brugge in Belgium and the Glaz Festival in Rennes, France. Images from her series have also been honored by top awards, including the annual talent program by Amsterdam's Foam museum and the Rabo Photographic Portrait Prize by the Dutch National Portrait Gallery. Jonathan in 2010. Herman's medium-format film requires stillness and time for each frame. Jonathan plays Monopoly in 2013. Jonathan in the snow in 2010.
Despite Jonathan's solitariness, he has always participated in the photographs, according to Herman. Her earlier images were quicker snaps, taken on a 35mm film camera, including those taken on a trip to South Africa to visit their paternal grandmother, when the body of work began in earnest. But when Herman switched to a medium-format camera in 2007, which uses slower shutter speeds and requires more careful framing, Jonathan and Julian had to remain still while the film was exposed to light.
In Herman's portraits, Jonathan first appears as a child sitting in tree branches or curled up in his father's lap. In one image, his eyes are closed while he lies across a worn leather chair in the snow, his head tilted back on the armrest. Then, as a teenager, he's seen sitting on the beach with Julian, a line of disrupted sand between them. Across his childhood, toy swords, guns and soldiers reappear in images that are often absent of objects.
'My brother was always trying to build a wall around himself,' she recalled. 'I think the toys and the weapons were his way of protecting himself.' Jonathan in 2021. He is now 23 years old. Jonathan with his father in 2010. Jonathan and Julian at the beach in 2016. Julian in 2023. He is now 80 years old.
As she photographs father and son, Herman lightly directs, making suggestions for where they might stand or sit, or where to look. But many gestures have come naturally, like the tension of Jonathan's small fist as he grasped his father's hand in the other, in an image that has become more widely associated with the series.
'These moments where I photograph them, they feel like a parallel world where we're together for just a moment,' Herman said. 'It's not really reality, because it's staged, in a way, and I take them out of their daily life. But there is a moment of quietness between us.'
Looking back over her archive to make the book, Herman felt time's fleeting quality acutely. Her grandmother appears in the beginning, during the three-week trip to South Africa, at the end of her life. Jonathan grows up, and Julian, now 80, has been dealing with Parkinson's disease for many of his later years. Beyond the images, there is new life and deep loss, with Herman giving birth to a daughter and Jonathan's mother dying from breast cancer. Jonathan and Julian in 2009. Herman restaged the same scene in 2017.
'It was quite intense, and also sometimes quite emotional,' she described of revisiting all of her images. 'I don't see it as a happy or an unhappy series. It's just about families and the complexities and struggles in life.'
Despite being one of her muses for two decades, her father has never given her feedback on the images, she said, but has remained a steadfast presence in front of the lens. 'He's quite confident just being himself, and he doesn't try to be something,' she said. 'I'm very self-aware when someone photographs me. But my father doesn't seem to have that.'
In the book, presented chronologically, only one image loops back, placing her father and brother in front of the same sheer curtain in her father's home that they sat in front of eight years before. As a boy, Jonathan softly looks at the camera, hands folded in his lap, while Julian's eyes are downcast. Later, they are nearly mirrored, switching positions and gazes, as Jonathan looks away.
Herman sees it as a subtle place to pause the steady flow of life and reverse it, however briefly, saying: 'It's this one moment where you feel you can go back and forth in time.' Sarah Mei Herman and Jonathan in 2005.