Teresa Merriweather, Bruce and Brian Kuzak, Tillie Merriweather, Twinsburg, Ohio, USA, 2001
(catalog number 405Q-032-001)

THE Twins Days Festival is an annual gathering of twins in Twinsburg, Ohio. I spent three summers photographing there. On the last two trips, I decided to work with a 20 x 24 Polaroid camera. I set up a studio in a big tent on the fairgrounds. Every day we looked for twins and brought them to the studio to make portraits. Wendy, an intern who worked with me, spent her days on the fairgrounds scouting twins. She found Bruce and Brian, who had cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus. They live in a special home, and their nurses at the time, Teresa and Tulle Merriweather, were also twins.

To get permission to publish their photograph, I had to contact their sister and legal guardian, Laura Srsa. She told me what it was like to grow up with Bruce and Brian. She was 9 when they were born. She said that from the very beginning the family accepted them for who they were. I asked her if she thought that being twins made their disability easier for them to bear. She said, "Definitely, yes. They have each other."

One of the most difficult aspects of being a documentary photographer is to take pictures of people, like Bruce and Brian, whose lives are very compromised. Pictures like this often make the viewer feel uncomfortable and scared. They don't understand them and accuse the photographer of being exploitative. One of the most rewarding moments of my career was when I received a letter after the Twins book was published. It was from Laura. It said, "Thank you for including Brian and Bruce. I cannot express in words how much this means to me. I feel so overwhelmed that you included them in your work -Laura."

Bruce and Brian's picture is my favorite photograph in the Twins project. Without these two men, the book would be far less powerful.