We investigate the breaking of Lorentz symmetry caused by the inclusion of an external four-vector via a Chern-Simons-like term in the Duffin-Kemmer-Petiau Lagrangian for massless and massive spin-one fields. The resulting equations of motion lead to the appearance of birefringence, where the corresponding photons are split into two propagation modes. We discuss the gauge invariance of the extended Lagrangian. Throughout the paper, we utilize projection operators to reduce the wave-functions to their physical components, and we provide many new properties of these projection operators.