
Julian & Jonathan
- Publisher
- GOST Books
- Year
- 2025
- Specifications
- Hardback
Spans more than twenty years of photographs
Documents the artist's half-brother Jonathan and her father Julian
Sarah Mei Herman was twenty when her half-brother Jonathan was born in 2001. When he was a small child she began to photograph him regularly alongside her father, Julian. The images in her book Julian & Jonathan span more than twenty years and document Jonathan's visible growth from child to adult, the steadier changes in Julian, and Sarah Mei's own journey as an artist, daughter and half-sister. In 2010 Sarah Mei was selected as a Foam Talent and the first years of this series were then published in Foam Magazine. The book is a long-form study of family bonds, generational difference and the relationship between siblings widely separated in age; it traces the quiet, accumulating intimacy of being photographed across decades, the slow choreography of a household, and the way photography can both record and shape a familial relationship. Through portraits made over more than two decades, the work reflects on coming of age, parental ageing and the entangled roles of artist and family member.