Christopher Capozziello has documented his brother Nick’s life and its struggles for the last thirteen years and the collection of black and white photos will soon be published as a book.

The collection, titled The Distance Between Us, is both a brother’s touching tribute and Capozziello’s attempt to come to terms with the reality his brother lives and one from which he happened to be spared.

‘The question I always asked myself as a child, and even sometimes now as an adult, is why did this happen to Nick and not me,’ Capozziello writes on a Kickstarter campaign page dedicated to help get his book published. ‘Why does this happen to anyone? The pictures ended up forcing me to deal with these questions.’

Capozziello has happily reached a fundraising goal of $16,000 and has stretched his goal to $25,000. Along with Austria-based publisher Lammerhuber, Capozziello is hoping to offset the cost of telling his story in book form.

‘For years,’ writes Capozziello, ‘I archived the pictures without ever looking at many of them. About ten years after the first pictures were made, and with a growing pile of photographs, I started to question why I continued to make these pictures.’

Thus was born The Distance Between us.

Photos of Nick are as uplifting as they are unflinching in their portrayal of Nick’s reality, one in which painful cramps and struggles to perform everyday tasks are commonplace.

Whether his brother is lighting a pretty girl’s cigarette or taking communion at church, Capozziello finds a way to convey Nick’s struggles and his triumphs. Though it isn’t Nick’s illness that Capozziello is most interested in.

‘It had little to do with showing what it is like to live with cerebral palsy,’ he says, ‘and more to do with sharing our story as brothers, and being open about my laments, and sharing how I began to move past the guilt I carried for being the healthy twin.’

The project has also allowed Capozziello to place his focus on the future.

‘The pictures have unexpectedly begun to help me move past my own grief, past my fears, and past our family to find out what lies ahead for Nick and me,’ he writes. ‘I don’t know how the future will look, but soon it will be just ours to figure out.’