Justin Quail has schizophrenia. Big Brother is his younger brother Louis’ account of his recent life, one lived on the periphery of society. This project and recently published book says to the world: ‘This is my brother. I would like you to see him.’
SINCE THE death of their parents, Louis Quail and his siblings have assumed the role of intermediaries between his brother Justin and those who would prefer not to notice people like him. Many would rather Justin was less visible; that he be taken care of by others, by ‘the system’. But that system inevitably has gaps and failures.
The family split when Quail was five, and he grew up in Norfolk with his father while Justin, his senior by eight years, stayed with their mother. As a result, Louis’ early memories of Justin are somewhat intermittent. But by all accounts Justin’s adolescence was messy and untethered.
By the age of 20, he’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and Big Brother chronicles the past eight years of Justin’s life. “This project has brought me closer to Justin than I have ever been,” says Quail. “I didn’t start it before, as I don’t think that I had the confidence, or the legitimacy. But now I’m inclined to believe that being ignored is worse than being intruded upon. I felt Justin really needed to be photographed, because he’s really on the lowest ladder of society due to this illness. I wanted to explain to people what it’s like.”
Quail began photographing professionally soon after graduating from Brighton University, although he studied graphic design and illustration. “As a kid, I had a little camera,” he recalls. “You read about how photographers were passionate when they were young, how their mother bought them a little Box Brownie, and away they went. I had a really, really awful Instamatic camera. I would have been 13 and shooting my family on it and I still have those photographs. It made almost shrunken, tiny pieces of film and the picture quality was awful.”
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“With no whipped cream available, we ended up using mentholated shaving foam. Oh, does that sting the eyes!”
“With no whipped cream available, we ended up using mentholated shaving foam. Oh, does that sting the eyes!”
