“I think the image of Nick with the cigarette hanging from his lips is my favorite.”
“Why does cerebral palsy happen to anyone? Why does cerebral palsy happen to my twin instead of me?”
Connecticut-based photographer Christopher Capozziello has asked himself these questions since childhood.
13 years ago, while starting out as a photographer, he started documenting images of his cerebral palsy-afflicted twin, Nick—that unknowingly help him deal with his own laments and his own grief of being the ‘healthy’ twin.
His heartbreaking photographs not only show the struggles of what it’s like to live with cerebral palsy, but also share their story as brothers.
Compiled into a book entitled ‘The Distance Between Us’ that’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, the images show the different, but no less difficult, world of one suffering from disability—and show that Nick is still an expressive individual with his own set of wants and desires, when you look past his struggles.
“I hope that through this book people will sense the tension between my love, my hope for Nick, and the deep grief I’ve dealt with being the healthy twin our entire lives,” Capozziello told Buzzfeed.
“I am the brother who survives and has choices and he is the brother who suffers and has less.”
“Through the questions in the text and the photographs themselves, I hope the book to be a testimony to family, and struggle, and love,” he added.
“One of the earliest pictures was of him in bed, waking from a cramp. I walked into our bedroom, and the sunlight on him looked beautiful. I crouched to make a picture and the shutter from my old Nikon was so loud that it startled him. He punched me in the face.”
“Nick’s favorite picture is the one of him with this woman named Rachel, the two of them dancing in a dive bar in San Juan Capistrano… While visiting some friends we ended up at The Swallows Inn, where he was eyeing this woman all night. She was the prettiest woman in the bar. My friend’s sister approached her and asked if she’d mind dancing with Nick. At first she declined, but then for some reason, she obliged the request. At one point during their dance she tells him not to look at her feet. Afterward, he confessed to me with a grin as wide as ever, ‘I wasn’t looking at her feet!’”
“Recently I read the book to Mom and Dad, and Nick for the first time. He didn’t make it past page 25… He began to tear up, and then couldn’t stop crying. He left the room and afterward said he has to live with this everyday, and that sometimes, it’s hard for him to hear me talk about it.”
[via Buzzfeed and Kickstarter]