"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."
Vogue Italia - Rica Cerbarano
"At first look, we see old photos of times and places from the past. But on closer inspection, gatefolds open, revealing unflinching portraits of Schatzberg’s remaining friends. It is both a look into the past and an acknowledgment of the present. We are here. We were there. Time has changed, and so have we."
“The Boys is a genius book, profoundly moving in the way it holds up past and present simultaneously and lets us consider them both in the same moment ...
[The Boys] is a monument and tribute to an often neglected species – the aging male. The so-called ‘gaze’ of the male looking back upon his particular ‘old times’ marked by youthful feelings of invincibility and permanency is now tinged heavily with the realization of finiteness.”
PhotoBook Journal - Gerhard Clausing
Rick Schatzberg’s The Boys , beautifully and honestly, brings me into the intimacy and vulnerability of guys, of manhood, of the friendship of men, sometimes a mystery to me, a woman. And to the bittersweet and complex later-in-life feelings and stories, of growing older but also closer, of losing but gaining and learning, the stories of men, and of all of us.”
"The Boys is a meditation on nostalgia, providing an overwhelming sense of contemplation. Between images both new and old, lost and found, Schatzberg’s friends relive their youth in between the present. Memory is exchanged, and for a second, time stands still."
British Journal of Photography - Isaac Huxtable
"Beautifully detailed colour portraits of his friends each posed, many naked from the waist up, their biographies evident in the very folds of their skin, and tone and texture of their hair. A sense of melancholy emanating from some, from others a mischievous twinkle in eyes that remain young at heart."
Schatzberg’s photography both acknowledges and undermines the fragile notion of masculinity and what a man should be: his subjects often stand defiant, yet their relative dotage is highlighted in sharp relief to shots of them in their prime.”
"...Schatzberg’s intimate and honest photos of these men are not only about what they will mean now, but also about what they will mean later. To live in this kind of expectation, the kind that speaks of the end-stages of aging in the midst of aging, is to be unflinching. Schatzberg’s sequence does exactly this, and the text, which mirrors the high and low of the images in being by turns poetical and diaristic, formal and informal, literary and colloquial, he has created his eulogy for both a youth long gone, and for the deaths of friends and loved ones yet to happen, his own included.
Literary Hub - Rick Moody
"Schatzberg’s portraits are both poetic and forensic – and, in their unflinching depiction of physical ageing, a riposte to a culture that is more often defined by the youth-fixated values of fashion and commerce. Perhaps for these very reasons, they seem defiant as well as poignant...Intriguingly, these formal portraits are literally embedded in the book, concealed behind gatefolds that have to be opened out. This makes them appear almost clandestine, but it also dramatically disrupts the diaristic flow of the snapshots, which convey an early 1970s suburban America that seems like a continuation of the hippy 60s – long hair, check shirts, denim and dope. Throughout, Schatzberg’s often incisive prose undercuts the idyll.
The Guardian - Sean O'Hagan
"Schatzberg’s portraits are both poetic and forensic – and, in their unflinching depiction of physical ageing, a riposte to a culture that is more often defined by the youth-fixated values of fashion and commerce. Perhaps for these very reasons, they seem defiant as well as poignant...Intriguingly, these formal portraits are literally embedded in the book, concealed behind gatefolds that have to be opened out. This makes them appear almost clandestine, but it also dramatically disrupts the diaristic flow of the snapshots, which convey an early 1970s suburban America that seems like a continuation of the hippy 60s – long hair, check shirts, denim and dope. Throughout, Schatzberg’s often incisive prose undercuts the idyll.
The Guardian - Sean O’Hagan
Rick Schatzberg has achieved something truly remarkable. The Boys renews my faith not just in the photobook, but in the ability to describe something new and profound in one's later years.”
Part memoir, part meditation and part photobook, The Boys weaves together memories, snapshots, correspondence and recent portraiture, to tenderly create a narrative about enduring friendships and what it means to be human.”
Rick Schatzberg’s poignant photographs with feeling prose makes one of the most loving works I've seen on aging. This is not just white men on Long Island growing older. It's us, too, with (apparently) youthful insouciance face to face with the bodily facts of getting older.”
We enter The Boys through a suburban back yard gate but within moments Rick Schatzberg positions his viewer front and center towards the meaning of life and friendship. Schatzberg’s intimate book tenderly fuses the past and present through a keen use of archival imagery, contemporary portraiture, and original writing. The Boys transcends the personal narrative and becomes an elegy for time’s passing and all that we hold dear.
"'I wanted to show our vulnerability, what we look like, what our skin looks like,' Rick said. Many agreed to bare their upper torsos. 'It's definitely not a group of guys who spend a tremendous amount of time at the gym, but I think people were cool with showing who they were,' Rick said. In addition to aging, the photos reveal tattoos and scars.'"
