Roger Ballen began photographing the material that became Boyhood in the 1970s, pursuing his subject for four years across Europe, Asia and North America. First published in 1979 as his debut photobook, the project considers boyhood not as a fixed stage of development but as a shared field of play, bravado, imagination and uncertainty. Damiani’s 2022 expanded second edition returns this early body of work to print in a 112-page hardcover volume, adding previously unpublished photographs from the period.
The settings range from Nepal’s Himalayas and the islands of Indonesia to Chinese provinces and American streets. Yet geography does not supply the book’s principal structure. Ballen looks instead for gestures and situations that recur across national and cultural boundaries: games improvised from available surroundings, small adventures, conspiratorial encounters and moments of absorbed solitude. Drawn from some 15,000 photographs, the black-and-white images establish an expansive comparative view without reducing their subjects to examples of a single thesis.
Photographs are accompanied by stories, giving the sequence a register closer to recollection or ode than to systematic social documentation. That distinction is important. Boyhood does not claim to inventory childhood around the world; it assembles encounters shaped by the photographer’s search for an elusive spirit of youth. The tension between the project’s continental scope and its intimate observations gives the work its particular character.
For collectors, this edition offers a considered point of access to Ballen’s earliest photobook practice and to a project conceived decades before its 2022 republication. The additional, previously unseen material enlarges the surviving account of the original undertaking while retaining its period context. Boyhood merits attention not through claims of scarcity, but through the chance it provides to examine how a sustained photographic inquiry was formed, edited and subsequently reopened through an expanded edition.
