Rick Schatzberg is a photographer living and making work in Brooklyn, New York and Norfolk, Connecticut. He received his MFA in Photography from the University of Hartford in 2018. Rick holds a degree from Columbia University in Anthropology (1978), played French horn with Cecil Taylor’s jazz ensemble in 1970s, and was a business executive and entrepreneur in the New York metropolitan area for many years. In 2015 he completed a one-year certificate program at the International Center of Photography. In the same year, his first monograph, Twenty Two North (self-published), was awarded first prize at Australia’s Ballarat Foto International Biennale. His second monograph, The Boys, was published in 2020 by powerHouse Books.

From The Boys by Rick Schatzberg, published by powerHouse Books

Interview by Dana Stirling

First, tell us a little about your journey with art and photography – how did it all start for you?

As a teenager and young man my passion was for music and I assumed that would be my career as well. This started with rock and pop music, but when I was 18, I became thoroughly immersed in jazz and played French horn in Cecil Taylor’s jazz orchestra, as well as piano in some off-shoot groups. In those days I also dabbled in photography, but my commitment to music left little room for much else. By my mid-twenties I came to the sad realization that even if I spent all my waking hours playing and studying music, I still wouldn’t have the chops to be a professional. I walked away from my life as a musician, but I took some lessons from Cecil and his circle that proved valuable later in life: how new artistic expression evolves from traditional forms incrementally but sometimes in quantum leaps; about the synthesis of wildly different inputs to make something new and powerful; and about the dedication it takes to accomplish anything worthwhile.

I have had a fascination with photographs for a long time, and over the years my wife and I built a very modest collection. But it was only towards the end of my business career that I picked up a camera again. This quickly became a compulsion and when I left the business world entirely, I devoted myself to this pursuit. I started by teaching myself but eventually decided to study more methodically. I began with some technical courses at the International Center of Photography (ICP), followed by an intensive summer program at Columbia University under Tom Roma. I returned to ICP for a yearlong, full-time program that I have come to think of as having been my Bachelor of Fine Arts equivalent. Two years after finishing the ICP program I entered the University of Hartford’s Limited Residency Photo MFA program, from which I graduated in 2018. During the course of my formal photography education, I had the opportunity to study with a wide range of artists and educators, and their cumulative insights helped to expand what I came to realize had previously been a very narrow view of the medium. I am particularly grateful to Tom Roma, Alec Soth, Ben Gest, Mary Frey, Michael Vahrenwald, Yola Monakhov-Stockton, and Darin Mickey for their generosity and encouragement.

In your new monograph “The Boys” you examine your long-time personal friendships and grief of losing your friends. The books seem to be a memorial, a shrine to good times and bad time all while using photography to both look back at the past and understand or maybe even accept the present. Can you tell us how this book came to be? What made you want to capture this subject matter in such a way?

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 what seemed like unusual clarity, though I hadn’t really been that close with either of them in many years. My re-estimation of their lives, suddenly with far less judgement than before, surprised me, and also got me thinking about who I should be paying closer attention to. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean I got the idea that I should be photographing our remaining group of a dozen childhood friends, many of whom I was still very close to. 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 project I could imagine.

After Jon’s funeral I mentioned this idea to my friends, and they were all game to participate. As my thinking about the project evolved, I understood that what I really wanted to do went beyond honoring our lost friends’ memories or creating a nostalgic keepsake. I wanted to investigate time and its manner of passing, through the lens of friendship. I wanted to make work that was intimate, remorseless, and loving – with the occasional joke. I wanted to make a book about origins and endings.

The book has a really effective use of old snapshots that really are a harsh juxtaposition to the modern portraits. The old images have a sense of nostalgia, almost a movie like quality that you feel you can dive into their moments. The new portraits although not necessarily sad they are more of a “reality check” when you see the people behind these colorful snaps and see how time and life have left their marks on them. I think these dualities really punch you in the gut when looking at them one after the other. Can you tell us about the process of taking these portraits? How did they react to you taking them?

I agree that there is a cinematic quality to the book for the reasons you describe. It’s important to me that the young-men/old-men juxtapositions provide a jolt and be unrelenting, not to be sensational but to be persuasive. Overall, I don’t really experience the book as nostalgic because the portraits, so grounded in the present, are what stick in my mind.

With respect to the portrait-making process, I discussed the deeper underlying ideas with my friends at the beginning of our photo sessions. My directions for posing were minimal, but these conversations helped to create the emotional atmosphere I needed to portray vulnerability. I also explained that I planned to use the work as the basis of my master’s thesis, so they understood that there would be a critical audience for the work beyond our circle. Their attitudes went from gracious acceptance to genuine interest. It was as though they became partners with a stake in the outcome. It was clear that I would be making unheroic portraits, and they understood there was good reason for doing so.

Ceremonial was the word that often came to mind during these photo sessions. Using a 4x5 film camera on a tripod, with all its fussy rituals and storied traditions, felt performative and serious. The slow, cumbersome, and mysterious (to my subjects) process commanded their attention and helped amplify the psychological intensity surrounding the project. In the face of our friends’ deaths – and often with the evocation of our fathers’ deaths – we were creating a formal certificate of presence (to use Roland Barthe’s expression), with traditional tools.

You chose to take the portraits of your friends in many cases with no shirts showing much of their skin. Can you tell us about this choice? And how did it affect, in your opinion, the dynamics while photographing?

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 these bodies was essential. But even for those without these external markers of illness, simply describing aging skin with color film was a way to make pictures of lived experience. In their compliance with my request that they remove their shirts for the camera, they demonstrated not only trust, but belief in the work itself, even if they didn’t quite know what to expect. I was touched by their willingness to display their vulnerability, but also by their subtle defiance. We are defenseless against time, and as much as we may know this, it is still humbling, even embarrassing. But when I look at the portraits, I also detect an attitude that asserts this is how I am, and I don’t care who’s looking.

Because the vintage snapshots throughout the book are so lively, so filled with comradery and environmental context, the approach I took in the portraits was to eliminate those attributes. It was a formal exercise in reduction; I can almost imagine the portraits being introduced as evidence in court. 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. This is certainly not to say that growing old is a purely negative, lonely experience; it is not. But in the long run, I can’t argue with Philip Roth’s grim quip that old age isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre.

The book definitely has that diary quality to it especially with the text. You feel like you are looking into something very personal and intimate. How did the text guide the book? I am sure it was a crucial part of the work, how hard was it to articulate everything you wanted to share?

Initially, I wasn’t sure if I’d write anything for the book aside from a short introduction or afterword. Before long I determined that I did want text as an element, not to describe pictures but to provide an interior voice. I was interested in constructing narratives that very loosely linked text and images which would stand as discrete memories – not stories as such but story-fragments. I chose to write a series of fragments that could function in different ways, shifting like moods: straight narrative; vague, recovered memories; amusing email dialogue; meditations. There’s a story I tell in the book about my father that I didn’t expect to share, thinking it would be out of place. I was having a conversation with my editor and I related the story to her, almost in passing. She told me to write it down and as soon as I did, we both knew it belonged in the book.

Once you choose a strategy of combining text and images to tell a story, there are so many new decisions that have to be made. I was already committed to a formal photographic approach for my portraits. Next, I needed to find the right voice to utter the words. I had many false starts; I rewrote endlessly. The trick, I felt, was to stay true to the voice that speaks more with subjective curiosity than with authority, but I frequently strayed. Often it was my editor who pulled me back in. This is the principal challenge in a literary memoir, and in a photobook-memoir there are additional decisions to be made about how much narrative weight you want the words to carry versus the photographs. This is not just a question of word count, of literal proportion, but also of visual editing. As Wright Morris, a mid-20th Century writer and photographer said of his unique “photo-texts,” These are two distinct mediums, with two different views. Only when refocused in the mind’s eye will the third view result. Ultimately, there is no formula, nor is there an editor, designer, or publisher who should make that decision for you, though they will all have opinions.

Can you talk a little about the choice of title? For me the term “The Boys” is a pretty classic American talk and culture. This notion of a group of men and their unbreakable bond and that no matter what age they will always be Boys. I think it’s an interesting choice of title for many levels and would love to hear your process of choosing it.

The Boys seemed like a simple and natural title because that’s the term we and others have used to identify this crew going back over half a century. It wasn’t the original title, however. I am one of those photographers/writers that can’t get out of the gate without a title, though I am unconcerned about whether or not it’ll change over time. Initially I called the project Old Ideas, a working title I liked for its multiple meanings, not to mention its allusion to a Leonard Cohen album by that name. The first time I described the project to my friend Connie, my text-editor-to-be, she simply said, how can you not call this The Boys? And that was that.

This book is very vulnerable, almost a contradiction to that notion of “The Boys” I mentioned above where masculinity and brotherhood is a big part of the dynamics. It’s interesting to see men, and especially older men, on this softer side of sharing pain, grief, age and struggles with something we don’t always get to see. I think it’s an important representation that might help others with their own perception of what “Boys” should be or act. This is only an observation but would be interested to see if you agree or what you might think of the notion.

The longstanding friendship between these men feels rare, even a little mysterious. It’s accepted wisdom that in America, as heterosexual boys become men, they are unlikely to sustain emotionally intimate male friendships. Against the grain in a society that views boys and men as emotionally illiterate, these close friendships—which began as early as nursery school—have persisted into our seventh decade. I think that the reason we share things “on this softer side,” as you put it, is because we shared most everything else along the way.

I would be interested to hear more about your book making choices. I found this book to be really well made and high quality but more importantly it has some really interesting choices in the editing and the physicality of the book such as the cover text embedded into it, or the choice of a large portion of full bleeds, photo placements, text design and much more. Can you talk about these choices? What was the hardest part of designing and making this book? What might be your favorite aspect of it?

Once I firmly landed on the strategy of mingling vintage snapshots, contemporary large format portraits & streetscapes, text fragments, and an additional essay by a third party, I knew that I would need to find a first-rate book designer. Such an incongruent mixture 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 a feature of the very first design iteration. The reader slows down and physically interacts with the book – not to view an extra-large picture in the foldout, the way gatefolds are typically employed, but to penetrate the work more deeply. The repetition works on the patient viewer. There were people I respected who advised against my using gatefolds for their being too fussy, for getting worn and bent over time, for just being annoying. I rejected this advice. It’s a fact though that the production of books with portraits manually tipped-in to the center of the gatefolds is an exacting and potentially problematic process, and others advised against this because they worried that the binding wouldn’t be strong enough to keep all the pages in. This is where the Dutch tradition of printers/binders working closely with designers really came into play.

Another design element you mentioned are the full bleed snapshots. Credit goes again goes to Syb. I think that the strategy of using the snapshots in this way helped to avoid a clichéd scrapbook effect, which was something I had been concerned about. Enlarged and full-frame, the 70s snapshots become stronger but blurrier, like memories or dreams.

With respect to the cover design, you can feel the debossed title with your fingers, but the words are only visible holding the book at an angle in certain light, a ghostly apparition.

It was important to assert my authorial voice without entirely drowning out my friends’ voices, which they asserted through the written word, their snapshots, and their gestures in the portraits. I think all of the things you mention – full-bleeds, photo placement, text design, etc. – had to work together to accomplish this.

A big part of this book is an archive of these old images – how was the process of first sifting through them all? And what made you choose the right photos for the book? What was important for you that these photos have in order to be a part of the end project?

I gathered the snapshots from friends’ photo albums or from boxes in which piles of photos were loosely stored. I grabbed everything that had any potential whatsoever, and especially those that showed the warmth and lighthearted clownishness that I think characterized this troop.

From that large pool I selected and scanned about 2-3 times as many snapshots as I needed for the book and sent them to my designer, Syb, to choose and sequence. I thought it might be better to add some distance, to have someone with no emotional attachment to these nostalgic images do the edit. I made several substitutions, but overall, I very much liked Syb’s choices and stuck with most of his selections.

The book has seemed to have been really well received by many other platforms and news/art mediums and I wonder if it is because this book does such a good job in merging the very personal and specific to the universal that many of us encounter in one way or another. What do you hope people looking at the work and the book take away from it?

Obviously, The Boys is radically specific: a very particular group of guys, of a particular generation, raised in a very particular American suburban community. As I was putting the pieces of the book together, though, I always tried to see it from the perspective of someone from another time and place. My feeling was that if the book isn’t felt to be universal then it will have failed. Mortality, after all, is the bedrock of our biology.

As for what I hope people will take away from it, I am reminded of something a photography teacher of mine once told me. He said a work of art reminds us of something we already know and is worth remembering: anxiety, heartache, loss, longing, fear, wonder, etc. To that I would add that in photography, the work leaves many gaps for the viewer to fill in. To know that a reader might have had a visceral response to the work, filling in the gaps from her own history, is the fleeting connection between myself and the world I hope for.

What might be your advice to other artists looking to make a photo book themselves?

Two things.

First: Look at a lot of photobooks. Really a lot. Peruse, read, study, analyze, enjoy, criticize, discuss, deconstruct, re-read. Old, new, domestic, foreign. Self-published, small press, trade editions.

Second: If you then decide to put another photobook out in the world, make physical dummies as early in the process as you can.

As we get closer to a one-year mark on a global pandemic, I wanted to ask if it has changed anything for you as an artist? Has it affected your work in anyway?

The pandemic, the forced rest due to some health issues, as well as the release of my book all have resulted in what has been respite from my typically obsessive approach to project-based work. While I have been re-charging, I have had the great good fortune to witness how my 18-month-old grandson – who I have been quarantined with since last March – experiences and pays attention to the world.

Lastly, what is next? Any news you would like to share? Book events or exhibitions we should expect in the future?

I would love to be doing in-person bookstore events and signings, but unfortunately these are off the table for the time being.

My publisher, powerHouse Books, recently held a virtual book launch for The Boys which was moderated by David Campany. It was very well-attended by friends, colleagues, and strangers from all over the map, and I really enjoyed the conversation as well as the audience questions. (The recording of the event with David Campany can be viewed here)

I did a second virtual book event that was organized by my local library in Norfolk, CT, the small, rural town where I have been living. It was very gratifying to see so many of my neighbors participating.

There are no gallery exhibitions on the horizon, though I think this isn’t simply pandemic-related. Rick Moody wrote in his essay included in my book that “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 audience is determined by fashion or by the merchandising demographics of the present.” 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 no market for them. It’s unlikely a commercial gallery would ever exhibit these prints for that reason. Fortunately, it appears there is a market for the book!

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