Max Lancaster’s Bunny And I is a delicate documentary on schizophrenia that swaps spectacle for sensitivity

“I had not seen my cousin Bunny in more than fifteen years,” says the London-based photographer Max Lancaster. “He always felt present but never quite part of the everyday flow of family life. When his name came up again recently I decided to reach out. Bunny takes his name from his surname Warren. My mum always told me that if I had been born a girl she would have named me Bunny too. That coincidence stayed with me.” In his newest photo series Bunny And I (following his project photographing the life of crew on a container ship), is a delicate documentary of not just his mother’s cousin, but of bipolar and schizophrenia – and how that looks on a personal level.

Bunny is a character worth getting to know. He frequently runs to the shop in his pyjamas for rum, wears big leather gloves and calls Orange Boom beers “his fuel” – as well as that, his notebooks appear throughout the photographs, filled with handwriting, drawings, diagrams, cut outs, poetry and abstract paintings that move between “humour and political urgency”. The title feels like a nod to the eccentric duo of Withnail And I. Alongside these notebooks are toy cars, collaged diaries, religious books and a moth he found dead and carefully framed. “He showed me books filled with imagery about God and the afterlife, pages marked with drawings of his drink and a battery which he described as his fuel. He told me about a book called Smoking Plutonium and how an inner voice had instructed him to destroy it,” says Max. “Everything feels lived in and charged with meaning.”

Firstly, Max photographed Bunny in a straight-forward fashion, but quietly, sensitively. Later on in the project, he decided to create patchworks out of the printed photos, representing the several versions and peculiarities of Bunny. The photos don’t veer into movie cliche depictions of split personalities or extreme mental instability. What Max found in his bloodline was not chaos, but cheerfulness, slight stress, some loneliness. Bunny is as normal as anyone else, evidently. He’s thoughtful, gentle and has spent a long time alone with his thoughts. “[He’s] someone who has often been described rather than properly seen,” says Max. Bunny And I hints at the tension inside all domestic lives, using mosaic compositions to offset what we’re seeing ever so slightly. Like a quietly glitching documentary.

In some photos, Bunny lies on his back with a drink resting on his hand, other times light falls across his face in the living room. Although he’s alert and enjoys drinking, he’s never out of control – he’s sharp and “notices patterns everywhere” – which manifest in the aesthetic of his own cut-up photographs and indeed inside of his personal notebooks. Bunny and Max share the same laugh, their grandfather’s, and when Max fixed Bunny’s television, an antique model car appeared on screen, identical to the one he had given Max half an hour earlier. It’s in these continuous coincidences that moved Max to realise that blood runs deep – we can all be quite alike. “Bunny and I is not about diagnosis or spectacle,” says Max. “It is about attention. About what happens when you spend a day really looking at someone you thought you knew. About two relatives meeting again as strangers and finding reflections in each other along the way.”