My Brother’s Keeper
Interview by Rosecrans Baldwin
Living halfway between suburbia and Trainspotting,
photographer Jason Florio’s brother is a heroin addict and a working parent. Florio’s series of pictures captures his brother’s life over 10 years of addiction—a life of addiction that’s far more common than what’s typically portrayed. As Florio states below, “My life as a photographer is based around being in other people’s ‘situations.’ This work is my first attempt to confront a subject that I cannot walk away from.”
Jason Florio’s work has been widely exhibited. He won the 2009 spotlight award from Black and White
magazine, and was a 2009 PDN
finalist for travel portraits. His editorial clients include Colors, The New Yorker, GQ,
and Outside.
He is currently hiking and photographing the perimeter of the Gambia. All photographs courtesy the artist, all rights reserved.
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What is your brother’s story?
For the past 22 years my brother has been a heroin addict. Over the past eight or so years whenever I return home to London (I live in New York City), I document his continuous struggle of being addicted, getting clean, detoxifying, and then relapsing back to using.
My brothers and I grew up in a stable, middle-class environment in a leafy commuter belt of London with no history of addictions in our family. My brother slipped into recreational heroin use in his late teens, and within months was a full-blown addict along with a slew of other teens from the surrounding neighborhoods.
In a sense, his story is common, but I wanted to portray his addiction uniquely. Addicts are often depicted as being poor, undereducated, unemployed, marginalized “losers,” or rock stars succumbing to the pressures of fame.
He is in a sense a “functioning” addict, in that he works his life around the continual need to “score” daily whilst being a working parent. The images of him are over nearly a decade and present him in a number of ways. We are all individually multiple; the faces he presents can be at moments so tender and at other times horrifying to witness.
My parents have not given up on my brother. On the contrary, they are emotionally and financially bound to buoy him up whenever he crashes. This puts them in a no-win situation facing two choices every moment: If they throw him out he may overdose on the streets, but they may be prolonging his addiction by supporting him. After many ups and downs, he has recently moved in with my parents with the aim to complete his fourth detox by the end of the year.
My life as a photographer is based around being in other people’s “situations.” This work is my first attempt to confront a subject that I cannot walk away from.
Is the series more your brother’s story, or the story of you two as brothers?
Inevitably if you have a heroin user in the family, then the family cannot help but become part of the story. So, although I don’t appear in the pictures, the fact is he is my brother, and the story I am portraying is about both of us.
Does photography distance you from the subject or bring you closer? How does your brother respond to the series?
Without sounding to parrot too many of my predecessors and peers, the camera can act as a conduit and shield. If I was not a photographer, I would look at my brother’s addiction very differently, I think. The camera has given me an opportunity to be with him at some of his most intimate moments and thus I find myself even closer and more emotionally involved with him and his situation.
He is entirely compliant in the process of making the images and has only asked me ever not to publicly show one of the images. His normal response is “damn I look so thin.” I think they are in a way a mirror of truth to him—the ones of him looking like hell are an encouragement to him to get clean again, and the ones of him looking healthy are a way for him to say, “I have been clean before, and I can do it again.”
What are you working on now?
I am currently in the process of planning my first “expedition.” My girlfriend and I, along with two locals (and two donkeys), are going to be making a 700-mile circumnavigation of the Gambia, a tiny West African country. I have been photographing in a sacred forest called Makasutu in the Gambia over the past 12 years and we decided that it was about time we saw the rest of the country. Rather than blazing around in a 4x4, which was mentally and financially out of our thinking and budget, we decided to do it by foot—drop out the rat race for a couple of months and collect stories and create images along the way. We are also doing it for a charity that helps local children create school gardens that encourages them to learn self-sufficiency and will connect them to a network of schools around the world in the same program.
We start the expedition on Nov. 1. For more info and to donate (!):
ashortwalkinthegambianbush.wordpress.com.
