Photography bears an overwhelming burden: as the medium of memory par excellence, time and loss are inseparable elements from its very nature. The photographic image
As if it were yesterday, I remember the thrill of leafing through family photo albums. When I was a child, it was one of my favorite hobbies. I loved being able “to rewind the film,” and observe a past filtered by the flashes of time, documented by the lens of a disposable camera.
Every so often, something particular happened: I would come across photographs of some of my parents’ friends who had passed away. I had never met them in person, so for me, they were just an image. I was aware that they had existed and had been friends with my mother and father. I also knew that the photograph I was holding in my hands was likely taken by either of my parents and that they had been present at that moment. So then... would my parents, too, one day become just an image? Is this what is left after death – nothing but an image?
When I began asking myself these questions, I realised that there is something quite fascinating about the way we relate to images of the past. It summons a sacred-like quality that is closely related to the idea of mortality—I remember the surprise of reading Roland Barthes's writings for the first time and noticing his words reveal my exact thoughts. More than any other artistic medium, photography confronts us with the fact that one day, we will leave this world. It reminds us that we are destined to become an image, or rather, a memory. However, in order to be a memory, we need someone to remember us. This is where the aspect of humanity comes into play: if images function through the act of seeing to assert a level of weight and importance, then one requires a person to actually look at a photograph of us to be remembered.
American photographer Rick Schatzberg’s photobook, The Boys,rekindled these thoughts in my mind. The past and present are often intertwined in our memories, yet are less often the case for the treasured photographs we preserve. In the poignant book that Schatzberg dedicates to his group of friends, however, this happens. He also “rewinds the film.” Although the story is imbued in the past, the present emerges as an unexpected frame, huddled among the gatefolds that rhythms the telling of the story. And the future, silent and invisible, hovers between these revelatory pages.
The Boysis a hybrid photobook that juxtaposes vintage snapshots, contemporary portraits, and text meditations written by Schatzberg himself. Each element renders the story of a male friendship over time, tackling issues of aging and loss.
Published by powerHouse Books, the photobook presents itself as a heart-rending memoir, filled with images and text, recounting the story of a group of friends originally from Long Island, New York. All born in 1954, The Boys – a nickname by which they call each other – grew up together in a “place with no history,” savoring the joys and light-heartedness of youth, unaware of their long-lasting friendship and what awaited them in the future. Yet, as it were and in the midst of the travails of their own existence, these 14 boys did not get lost along the way.
After almost 60 years of friendship, two of his oldest friends died unexpectedly in 2017. Schatzberg then set out to realise a portrait that would embody this special friendship, in order to metabolise and find meaning in such dreadful loss and pain. In the final preparation stages of the book, two more of The Boys had passed away, with 10 remaining out of the original 14.
This project is the result of two years of meticulous work: from researching into friends’ family archives, to shooting contemporary portraits with a large-format camera, to editing numerous text sections. Each step has been masterfully assembled thanks to the collaboration of the Dutch photobook designer, Sybren Kuiper. Additionally, a moving essay by Rick Moody, who carefully comments upon Schatzberg’s story, is included in a 12-page booklet at the end of the book.
The Boysis an object that must be handled with care, similar to human relationships. Indeed, I like to think that its structure reflects the architecture of long-time friendships in some way: unfolding fragile and rare bonds, it allows you to spy into the crevices of people's lives without much compromise.
The gatefolds embrace the faces and bodies of his longtime friends as they are now: their skin bears the traces of the people they had been. The machismo exhibited during their fun-loving youth has evolved into something more reflective and meditative – it almost seems like they are in limbo, waiting. The future materialises in the light that surrounds them in these shots. As Schatzberg himself wrote, “time’s unfolding is obvious: balder, grayer, folds and wrinkles, scars. There is an eternal present in a photograph, but I see the past, present, and future all at once.”
Schatzberg’s story is undoubtedly a personal one – a story confined in time and space, yet, it is much more than this. The book speaks of the strenuous fight against death, one that we humans believe we can win – supported by photography and its seeming immortality. It speaks of those who leave us and of those who stay. It speaks about those people that are transformed into images and disappear from the concreteness of our lives.
After diving into this book, I can’t help but think about the future of my own life’s memories. I dare you not to.
Read my conversation with Rick Schatzberg to learn more about the project.
When did you realise it was time to think about this project? Could you tell me more about its genesis and how the idea developed?
In the spring of 2017, I was in Berlin with my wife, Marilyn, when I got a message from an old friend telling me Jon had died of a drug overdose. Only 9 months earlier, another friend from our group, Eddie, had died suddenly of a heart attack. On the plane ride home, all I could think about was Jon and Eddie. I saw them vividly, with unusual clarity, though I hadn’t really been that close with either of them in many years. I thought about something I’d read in an interview with novelist Philip Roth. He said that we expect grandparents and then parents to die at certain stages of our lives and we know that our children are supposed to outlive us, but we are completely unprepared for the death of friends. It’s like a contract, Roth explained, but in this contract there’s nothing written about friends, so when they start dying, it’s a gigantic shock. That seemed exactly right. My sudden re-estimation of their lives led to my thinking about photographing our remaining dozen friends from childhood. By the time my plane landed in New York, undertaking a formal photo project about these men and their longstanding friendships seemed the most meaningful work I could make.
Over the next few days, I thought it through more deeply and discussed it with my friends, all of whom were game to participate. I now knew that what I wanted to do went beyond honoring our lost friends’ memories or creating a keepsake. I wanted to take a frank look at aging and mortality and to make a book about it. Death is inevitable, but we often live as if it is something that just happens to unlucky people. We mourn the loss of loved ones, and the grief may be intense or devastating, but we cannot imagine our own absence. I wanted to make work that not only keeps the end in mind, but which was largely about keeping the end in mind.
The design of the book seems to mirror the complexity and fragility of something like friendship, and somehow resembles the architecture of human relationships. Can you tell me more about how you conceived the design?
For starters, the approach I took to the book design was finding a great designer. Combining disparate elements into a coherent whole – vintage snapshots, contemporary large-format portraits and streetscapes, a dozen sections of text, and a relatively lengthy afterword – can go very wrong. I had it in my mind that I should find a Dutch designer. The Netherlands has a long tradition of producing complicated photobooks involving a close collaboration between photographer, designer, and printer. A colleague introduced me to Syb, whose work I was already familiar with, and it was clear from the outset that we could work well together. For two years, Syb and I collaborated closely. We made multiple book dummies and continual revisions, both major and minor, resulting in countless updated PDFs. There were a number of design elements that I liked at first, but which over time, felt like distractions and had to be pared back. This is very much like editing photos or text: a ruthless process of discarding the superfluous however much you love it.
One design element that was present from the beginning and which I never considered eliminating, was the double gatefolds. The idea of concealing and then revealing the older versions of these men after seeing their younger selves was always central to the book’s concept. Opening and closing the gatefolds slows the viewer down and forces them to reckon with these aging bodies framed by blank white pages. The production of books with portraits manually tipped-in to the center of the gatefolds was an exacting and potentially problematic process, and this is where the Dutch tradition of printers/binders working closely with designers really came into play.
Your comment about the book design resembling the architecture of human relationships is interesting. Each time a gatefold is fully opened and closed again, it shows a little more wear. They have a tendency to get frayed or torn over time (which is why some people dislike gatefolds). To me, this may be more suggestive of human frailty than of friendships that I think of as durable, but both seem plausible responses.
A reader contacted me to say she was struck by the work’s heteroglossia, the presence of two or more voices in a text or other artistic work. I hadn’t known that word before, but the idea of expressing friends’ voices through their written word, snapshots, and gestures in the portraits was central to the concept of the book, prior to its physical design. As was the challenge of expressing my own authorial voice without drowning out theirs. Form follows function, as the cliché goes, and the principle still holds for book design.
When I read your texts, I immediately thought about the work of Wright Morris and his so-called ‘photo-text’ books.The Boysis truly a piece of literary work and not just a photobook. What is your personal relationship with writing? Had you ever written before?
First, let me say that I love your reference to Wright Morris and his photo-text books. He seems to be mostly forgotten these days. In fact, I don’t recall ever hearing his name mentioned in art school, despite being in an MFA program with an explicit focus on photobooks. Morris’s formal experiments in the telling of stories, his construction of narratives that link image and text to stand as discrete memories –not stories as such but story-fragments – is close to what I was striving for. For Morris, they seem to function more as dreams than narratives. And that is how I envisioned depicting my own obsessions with the nature of memory; with time and its manner of passing; with the unreliability of fixed or permanent identities despite our emotional attachment to those identities; and with the mysterious bonds between a group of men for more than 60 years.
Written expression has always been very important to me, though more so as a reader than as a writer. Before The Boys, I had never written anything for publication. Mostly just a lot of personal communication, or for business, and papers for school. (I am a lifelong student, earning an MFA at the preposterous age of 65, so writing for school is something I’ve done my share of throughout my adulthood.) When I made the decision to complement the photographs in the book with text to provide an interior voice, I struggled at first and had many false starts. Persistence was the key. Much like my decision to engage a designer early on in the process, I also recognised at the outset the value of having an editor, and I contacted a friend who does this for a living. I don’t care how good a writer you are, you can be better with a good editor. In my case, one who constantly challenged me to say more with less. Literally fewer paragraphs, sentences, adverbs and adjectives. (We argued a lot. Connie was usually right.) I soon came to love my daily writing process. For one thing, the busyness of the photo sessions and challenges of making large format portraits, using only window light, drew my mind away from the existential subject matter I was trying to stay focused on: mortality. The writing pulled me back. I’d start the day before sunrise reading better writers’ poems, stories, or essays with my coffee, and within 15-30 minutes I’d be up in my studio writing. I learned for myself what almost every good writer tells you: writing is rewriting. And then, I learned that something I rewrote twenty times, only has real potential if I liked it as much late at night as I did in the morning. That was rare.
The book deals a lot with the medium of photography and its evolution, combining vintage snapshots and contemporary large-format photography. Can you tell me more about this stylistic choice? How did you work with these different sources?
I am interested in photography as a means of storytelling, as a narrative, but also as a sort of performance. The nature of the performance, in this case, was different for the use of snapshots than it was for making portraits, of course. But in the end, the goal was to put it all together – along with the text – to create a coherent story from these documents of that performance.
I gathered the snapshots from my friends’ photo albums or piles of loose photos in boxes. I love that the authorship of these unpretentious photos is mostly uncertain: taken by one of the boys, our other friends, friends of friends, girlfriends, wives, ex-wives. It really doesn’t matter who took what photo. And the cameras! Instamatics, Brownies, the occasional Nikon, Canon, or Pentax SLR. For me, the contrast between these images and the veryauthored large-format portraits makes the snapshots feel even more whimsical and gives the portraits even more of a gut punch.
You may be surprised to learn that I scanned and sent Syb (my designer) two or three times the number of snapshots than we needed and allowed him to make the selections for the book. I thought that it would be interesting to have someone else, someone from a different country, and with no knowledge of anyone in the book except for me, make the first cut. In the end, I made some additions and deletions, but by and large I liked Syb’s choices and stuck with most of his selections.
Because the snapshots are so lively, so filled with comradery and environmental context, I decided to eliminate all those elements in the portraits. Instead, we face an isolated man in front of a bare wall, bare-chested or perhaps in an old house robe. Despite the bonds of friendship that are still strong, this isolation – even pre-pandemic – feels accurate to me, at least metaphorically. And I always catch a glimpse of myself in these portraits.
The “70s” vibe and places you depict, strongly imbued of American culture, I feel, are light-years away from my reality as a 28-year-old living in Italy. Yet, this project strikes me deeply, perhaps because it resonates a feeling of nostalgia that I may never experience. I grew up seeing this kind of thing, in films and books, but also from my parents' memories. I suspect my generation as a whole learned to manage relationships in a characteristic way that no longer works by following a set of rules. Relationships are different now, as does the memory of those relationships. In 20 years from now, the billions of snapshots taken with my friends will likely be lost in a cloud archive or in a digital database, who knows? At the same time, it is ironic that in a time where the consumption of images is at its highest, what will in fact remain of my long-lasting relationships will be my memories. Although there is a long tradition of intimate and biographical photographic works like,The Boys, it occurs to me that this work may be the last of its kind. Have you ever thought about it?
I do think about these things. I am a father of a 32-year-old daughter and a 30-year-old son. I am a grandfather, quarantined together with my grandson for the past year. The questions you pose about the future, I wonder about these things too, but for them. Photographs now are less for saving as memories than they are a language to speak with in real time, or something close to that. But I had not thought about whether this work might be among the last of its kind, and I’m not sure what to say about that. Somehow I doubt that, but maybe it’s because I don’t have the capacity to imagine where we are headed.
I will try to address your comments about the “70s vibe,” nostalgia, and questions about whose reality this represents. Obviously, this work is radically specific: a very particular group of white guys of a particular generation, raised in a very particular American suburban community. From the outset though, my feeling was that if this work isn’t felt to be universal, then it’s a failure. Mortality, after all, is the bedrock of our biology. That said, I enjoy the fact that there are different interpretations of the work, resulting in different emotional responses. I don’t feel it’s particularly nostalgic, for example, despite all the snapshots evoking youth and a certain time and place. For me, the portraits keep it very much grounded in the present. But for some, the work is deeply nostalgic, whether they lived through those times (the 70s) or not – like film and novels, photography is very good at triggering anemoia, the word for nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. People of different ages have written to tell me that the book made them call their old friends to reconnect, while others said it made them sad for what they’ve missed, like youthful comradery or maintaining old friendships into adulthood. All these responses interest me. A work of art often reminds us of something we already know and is worth remembering: anxiety, heartache, loss, longing, wonder, etc. In photography, the work leaves many gaps for the viewer to fill in.
There are different themes and levels of reading this book. Time and death can’t be avoided – they are a nagging presence throughout the development of the book and possibly one of the elements that works best at transmitting this feeling of aging are the pictures of bare torsos and close-ups of the skin. When did you have this idea and realised this could be interesting to explore?
These aging bodies are facts of life, but we don’t usually see them portrayed. It’s especially rare in color photography. To do something worthwhile in this series, I wanted to give myself and viewers something new — and maybe difficult — to see. At first, I was thinking about three of the guys who have dramatic scars on their torsos — the result of serious illnesses —and so, from the outset, I felt that in a project focused on aging and mortality, depicting this was essential. But even for those without these external markers of illness, simply describing aging skin with color film was important. I also felt that the willingness to remove their shirts for the camera simultaneously exposed my subjects’ vulnerability and subtle defiance. We are defenseless against time, and as much as we may know this, it is still humbling, even embarrassing. But I also detect an attitude of this is how I am, and I don’t care who’s looking.
How was it portraying your friends in the present? How did they react to your ideas?
During our photo sessions, we discussed some of the deeper, underlying themes of the project I had begun to think about. My directions for posing were minimal, but these conversations created the atmosphere I needed. I also explained that I planned to use the work as the basis of my master’s thesis, which highlighted two important points for them. First, there would be a critical audience for the work beyond our circle. And second, there were deadlines I had to meet, which meant I would be aggressive and persistent in scheduling follow-up sessions. Their attitudes went from either obliging to gracious acceptance to genuine interest. It was as though they became collaborators with a stake in the outcome. They understood I would be making unheroic portraits that might not be flattering, and that there was good reason for doing so.
The word that often came to mind in making these portraits was ceremonial. Using a 4x5 film camera, with all its fussy rituals and storied traditions, felt performative and serious. The slow, cumbersome, and mysterious (to my subjects) process helped amplify the psychological intensity surrounding the project. In the face of our brothers’ deaths, we were creating a formal certificate of presence – to use Roland Barthe’s expression.
The writer, George Saunders, describes storytelling as a kind of ceremony. He likens it to the Catholic Mass, the heart of which is communion. For me, a Jewish guy from New York, the relevant ceremony for my story is the Mourners’ Kaddish, the heart of which is a living community. Beyond the heart, Saunders adds, the rest is decorative, though "beautiful and necessary to the extent they serve the heart of the ceremony."
A couple of our photo sessions were the occasion for a number of us getting together at one guy’s home, and I’d photograph several of my friends in succession, an exhausting process for me that could last hours. While I was photographing someone, the others would be hanging out in the next room, smoking, drinking, listening to music, and telling stories. When I was finished making pictures, I’d join the group, and we’d carry on for a few more hours. These sessions are now as much a part of our history as any other event we might someday talk about and remember imperfectly.
In his essay, Rick Moody writes: “...photos of creaky, decaying, older white men struggling for dignity are perhaps the hardest photos to look at now. There is no audience, in the strictest sense, for these images, if the audience is determined by fashion or by the merchandising demographics of the present.” I think this is a very important statement. In your opinion, what is the audience of this book?
I agree with Rick Moody’s observation, that strictly speaking, there’s no audience for the images of these old men. Or maybe, I should say, there’s nomarket for them. It’s unlikely a gallery would ever exhibit these prints for that reason. The book, however, is a different matter, and I do think there’s an audience for it, albeit modest-sized (which is true for photobooks generally).
When I was writing the text for the book, I always envisioned a reader, someone to whom I was telling these stories and meditations about aging, friendship, and loss. Likewise, I’d imagine the jolt a viewer might get, seeing the juxtaposition of the younger and older versions of these men. I do not make work for myself alone; I need to imagine a viewer/reader with whom I am communicating something I have discovered, in the hopes that it will spark her imagination.
I am publishing to be read. We printed 1,500 books, and I like to think each copy will end up in someone’s home.
What have you learned since working on this project? And what are your expectations from the book?
It’s hard to know where to begin! On a creative level, I learned that combining images and text is a very natural and satisfying way for me to work. And that there are subjects to explore that are so obvious, so much a part of my atmosphere, that they can go unnoticed.
I learned innumerable things of a technical and practical nature about portraiture, writing, and book-making. These details are too prosaic, too boring, to innumerate.
On an emotional level, I gained an even greater appreciation for the strength of the comradery amongst these men I’ve known my whole life. I counted on their trust and generosity, and these were offered in such abundance, it still surprises and humbles me. From the time I began this work, I have thought a lot about the significance of “arriving at the threshold of old age,” and what that transition entails. I observe how we are all coping – each in his own fashion – with the complications that come with this stage of life: loss, accumulation of chronic ailments, isolation, regret, and fear of outliving one’s money, are parts of the changing landscape. Alongside resilience and humor, though perhaps a bit darker than before.
The book is finished and out in the world. I don’t know that I can expect anything from it. I do hope though, that I continue to hear responses to the work.