A Lens on Life
How documentary photographer Bill Bamberger makes sense of his own life—and creates connection and community with the world—through his compelling stories.
Earlier this year, my therapist gave me an assignment to make peace with the 22-year-old girl in the picture above. “I want you,” she told me, “to show her some compassion.”
It was a tall order for this short girl. As I’ve hinted in this newsletter, my early 20s lodged soft bits of shrapnel in my sternum that I’d ignored for a couple of decades. This photo has since become a portal to reconciling the searching kid I was then with the woman I am now.
I love that it exists, even if I have not always appreciated the girl who lives inside it.
My talented friend Justin took this photo in my office at Sports Illustrated in 1995 while he was visiting New York. He and another friend, John, who had traveled with him, helped me relocate from my temporary lodging in lower Manhattan to a sublet on the Upper West Side. They hailed multiple taxis for my belongings, babysat my boxes and bags as they traveled up Broadway, schlepped them into my apartment, and supported my new life with a generous level of enthusiasm.
Justin, John, and I were supposed to be sharing an apartment in Atlanta that summer—until I backed out of our plans and backed out of a job at the Journal-Constitution to come to SI instead.
There are countless what-ifs inside this image’s borders, the contraction and expansion of a life just beginning, and memories of some pretty forgiving friends. It has survived all these years because it had stories yet to tell. It survived because whatever Justin saw as he focused his lens on that naive girl, he knew that it mattered then and that it might matter again one day.
And he was right.
Documentary photographer Bill Bamberger recognized the truth in that idea long ago. He has spent his award-winning career capturing what it means to be young at a particular moment in our lives. His coming-of-age series Boys Will Be Men has chronicled that junction for four decades, from a private boarding school in New England to a public high school in Flint, Mich. The third chapter of BWBM—a look into the lives of students at a public charter in Durham, N.C.—continues this fall.1
Bamberger’s work is characterized by projects that move in symmetry with the communities they capture while also prompting us to consider moments of change, solitude, and renewal. Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory, which followed the last days of one of the oldest furniture companies in the South and the workers who dedicated their lives to it, won the Mayflower Prize in Non-Fiction and was a semi-finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
Hoops, an uncommonly stirring collection depicting empty basketball courts across North America and abroad, appeared at the National Building Museum in 2019, one of several major exhibits of Bamberger’s art. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the North Carolina Museum of Art, The Nasher Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery have also hosted his one-person exhibitions.
I first encountered his photographs in the now (famously) defunct but deliciously rewarding arts journal DoubleTake while I was restarting my career in graduate school at Northwestern. Bamberger, who is now an instructor at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, was a frequent contributor to its pages.
Three years ago, at an exhibit at the N.C. Museum of Art, I found his photography once more and followed its inspiration to an essay about my own adolescence.2 It seemed only natural to ask an artist whose work had enthralled me so much over so many years to talk with me about what he’s learned.
When we met earlier this month at his home studio, Bamberger, who lives in Durham with his wife, Mehri, and their 14-year-old daughter, Lillian, had recently returned from Rwanda. There, he collaborated with artist Jacques Nkinzingabo to install 100 photos of Rwandans to commemorate the 100-day period of genocide that took place 30 years ago.
Rwanda Reseen is breathtaking work, made more poignant by Bamberger and Nkinzingabo’s long treks to present Rwandans with individual portraits that, in many cases, had been taken a decade earlier. Printed on waterproof fabric, many photos were also installed outdoors in public spaces.
Below is my conversation with Bamberger on adolescence, community, and storytelling—along with several of Bamberger’s incredible images. (You can view many more on his website.)
I’ve read that the inspiration for Boys Will Be Men came from sorting through your own adolescence, those loose ends of youth.
Yeah, I grew up with a father who was very involved but had a major problem with alcohol. It was something we kind of lived with in those days. People called it a drinking problem. They didn't like to say alcoholism. My parents were going through these difficulties all through my high school years. He just wasn’t the ideal husband. He did things I didn’t approve of but knew about.
He left my mom, and we went from being very well off as a family to losing all of our resources that he had either squandered or spent or borrowed. We lost our home. He took no responsibility. I said to him one day, “When you can tell the truth about this, call me back.” I thought he would in a week. Everyone loves their parents, even if they are troubled and do the wrong thing sometimes.
He didn’t call me. A week went by, then a month, then a year, and then an entire adult lifetime.
How old were you when you had that conversation?
I was 21. The year I graduated college was when we had our last conversation. I'm grateful for a mom who is completely invested in her children, who took care of us, even if that meant working really long and extra hours. But still, I really missed the presence of a father in those years. Parents are role models, and they help you understand when you have difficulty with friends or with your first intimate relationship. They are there for you in your most formative years. He was never there.
For me, the Boys Will Be Men project was partly about answering that question: Who am I as a man, and what does that even mean?
How did you define that when you were in school? Do you remember consciously considering it?
I had gone to a very liberal public high school and also two years to a private school. I was an athlete. I was president of my class at boarding school. I was the person who could have been the bully. But I just never believed in that, and many of my friends didn’t, either. We didn’t have a name for it yet, but I always knew that kind of toxic masculinity—where you witnessed men speaking more than they should and not listening enough, and the “locker-room talk” that Donald Trump brags about—was there. But so were the really decent, thoughtful young men who were coming of age and cared about others, especially others who were different. That’s really a part of what I was looking at with Boys Will Be Men.
And there continues to be a need for conversation about what it means to be male. There were many students at Deerfield who were gay, and they either hadn't come to terms with it yet or they were not out. And there are always men who are just more gentle or more feminine. Today it’s even more varied. Now, we're exploring the notion that we have a right to choose our gender and how we identify. Several of the students I photographed as part of the current project at the Durham School of the Arts were assigned female at birth, but identify as male or non-binary. It's fascinating, and it's going to take this whole project full circle.
The conversations must be different with students now than when you began BWBM at Deerfield Academy in the 80s.
They are. In Flint in the early 2000s, a lot of the discussion with students was: “What is the ideal man?” And a lot of them would speak of their fathers as role models, a definition of fatherhood, which became a definition to them of manhood. Now, when we begin the conversation, we start with toxic masculinity because that is so much in our vocabulary when we talk about maleness now. Where is the place for young people who identify as male in this world? And more importantly to me, is there a place of goodness in this? Is there a place to say, “Yes, I identify as male, and here is what I think the ideal looks like, something I can be proud of and feel good about?”
That's a really interesting question. So what does “being good” mean today for young people who identify as male? What have you learned from them?
That it's harder for them to know how to be. It's harder to know the ideal level of traditional masculinity—and I don't mean toxic, but more the physicality of occupying that space. What parts of that are good?
Did you find any differences in how boys in a mostly white boarding school and a diverse public school face the challenges of coming of age?
What I came away with is that a lot of the struggles that young people have are similar regardless of family wealth or background. The issues of identity, of finding belonging, of isolation within the community, of struggling with broken homes and their parents’ addictions, of wanting that kind of love and affection from a parent— those things are real for all young people, whether they're rich or poor.
So much of your work has been about going into communities and building relationships as you photograph, often for a year or more. Hoops was so different but so beautiful. What did it mean to you?
It was a time for reflection where you don't have to engage in the same way, where you can travel and wander and be accountable to just yourself and what interests you. It began as a post-divorce project where I needed a little downtime to be less engaged day to day. It's interesting as a photographer when you can just look at the world and be free to photograph it as it comes to you, to be otherwise agenda-free. How often do you get to do one thing and really focus on it without distraction?
It’s absolutely rare to find that kind of freedom. How do you balance your family role now with the time it takes to tell these stories of depth and community?
In this house, my joke with my friends who know Mehri and me is that medicine trumps art. She’s an infectious disease physician at Duke. So especially during Covid, she’s saving all these lives, she’s a first-line defender, she’s the priority. It was her assignment a decade ago with the Clinton Health Initiative to work in a Rwandan hospital that brought me to that country, and we took Lillian with us. So there’s that balance of working together that’s nice.
One of my favorite photos from Rwanda is of the two girls in front of the mural at the orphanage.
When I took that in 2013, that was kind of revolutionary. The text said, “I'm smart, I'm beautiful, I'm strong” in Kinyarwanda and English. That was a daring thing for women to say about themselves because Rwanda is also a country where men were completely privileged and dominant in so many ways. In the genocide, so many men were killed that women now were heads of households raising families.
One of the organizations that hosted me, their principal work was helping women who were heirs to land get clear title, so they could borrow and start businesses. Women had no vehicle to own property the way that men did. That was 10 years ago. Today, Rwanda has more women in government per capita than any country in the world.
That’s incredible. Many of your Rwanda photographs also told the story of young people, just as you’ve been doing with Boys Will Be Men.
It’s funny you say that. I haven’t really thought about it that way, I think because Rwanda is a whole country of young people now—so many parents and grandparents were lost in the genocide. At first, I had imagined telling a post-genocide story about younger Rwandans who had been orphaned during the genocide and who were now raising families of their own. But as I came to know people and traveled around the country, I realized that was the epic cliché. While people thought, “Yes, that’s important,” they also thought, “We really don't need to do this again.” They were tired of that framing. So that was partly the story I wanted to tell: Who they are now, their generosity and compassion.
What’s it like for you to take these portraits back and see a resident’s reaction to them?
It’s so interesting and exciting. It really is. Sometimes, people are shy about it. Sometimes, it’s a total celebration, and everybody in the community comes out. In some cases, it would take us a full day of traveling, going from village to village, school to school, talking to people, showing them the photos, and trying to locate the person in the print. Like all of these projects I’ve done, this had the common thread of working close to people with a kind of intimacy.
Do you ever think about how to represent your mother’s story, how to capture your family’s story?
No, I don't. I remember taking some photographs when the divorce was happening, and my mom was devastated financially. But they were almost too personal. I guess I feel a little bit private about that. I don’t mind you interviewing me, but I feel less comfortable with the idea of me sharing my own images or my own family story than if you were to take my picture or write about me.
Why do you think that is?
Maybe it’s because I’m too much of a perfectionist. It’s hard to capture yourself or write about yourself because you need a little distance from the subject to understand it well. You probably find that when you are writing your story, too.
It’s the difference between journaling and writing for others, and I’m still learning it. And of course, like you, just being comfortable with sharing it outside of my own head.
So many artists are like that. But when you decide other people can benefit from this, that changes the comfort.
I appreciate that perspective. That responsibility of portraying others in an honest way, and how you’ve done that visually, is one of the things that most interests me about your work.
I often have a different view of what images will resonate. That’s why I like to work with and become a part of the communities I’m documenting. For Closing, I had chosen a photo for an exhibit poster that was kind of dark and mysterious. But when I asked the workers, they picked an image of poster beds in the factory lined up in beautiful light. We were telling the story of the life and death of the factory, but they wanted to focus on the life. I thought it was so simple and so smart. And that's what we went with.
You want the artistic freedom to tell the story. But it's the little things that are so important to a community. If you just pay attention, you can tell the difficult parts, too, and people will feel heard. ♣
Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, N.C., will exhibit the third installment of Boys Will Be Men in early 2026.