How To Name Photographs
By Frank McMains
21 Jun 2009
A Boy's Life Guide to Experientialism or How to Name Pictures
I am an occasionally serious, amateur photographer and I like to put titles on the pictures that I shoot. Even if the pictures are fleeting snapshots without ambition toward art, I try to sum up the subjects or capture something of what was going through my head when I took the shot. These titles are frequently more complex than the pictures themselves. Mining the lode of references, questionable puns and turns-of-phrase that flash through my head is a sort of personal exercise for tamping down my circadian dust-up with anxiety. Some people have a secret patch of their childhood blanket. Some have a fading picture that signifies more innocent times. I write down the incomplete thoughts that sometimes turn my inner dialog into a one-sided shouting match.
All of these non-sequiturs as photo titles may read as too precious-by-half or a blunt effort to impress people. No doubt, some of them are but I have gotten very bad a figuring out the difference between showing off and just trying to do my best. Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I really scotch it up. A recent photograph of all the things I planned to pack for a long weekend in New York, spread out on my bed, was titled "A Boy's Life Guide to the Lower East Side." Without patting myself too firmly on the back, I'll just say that I liked the name enough to run it over in my head during much of last weekend's trip to that carnivalesque and presently ice-bound city. The idea of a Boy's Life guide calls up an unapologetic naïveté about the ways of the world. I mean that as a virtue.
The magazine of my scouting youth was a sort of ruddy-faced embrace of wilderness, city and home. You could not open the pages of Boy's Life without getting some of its piping optimism on you. Whatever the subject of an article, the magazine left this young reader with the impression that there was nothing that a plucky boy with a pocketknife, twine, magnifying glass and a good compass could not accomplish. No chasm too wide to span, no winter storm too frozen to brave, no gaggle of aging grandmother too imperiled to assist. That was the spirit of Boy's Life. It was about keeping your eyes open, being prepared, being considerate, modest and mindful of the world.
I am no strapping outdoorsman. I can shoot a gun, light a fire and ride a horse but those are really the vestigial skills of Boy's Life magazine. The real message, intended or otherwise, of Boy's Life seems to be a generous curiosity about the world. The articles in Boy's Life were about guileless optimism for a world in which the reader would one day play an exciting and meaningful role. The ads in the back of its pages were gasoline for the adolescent imagination. Mother's vacuum cleaner into a hovercraft, Sea Monkeys, X-Ray glasses. These were the cornerstones with which we would build our log cabin empire and the bright polar stars we would use to navigate our sailboats hither and yon.
Rarely will one be called upon to sooth a headache with tree bark or splint a fellow travelers leg on some desolate portion of the Appalachian Trail but I think some bit of the Boy's Life weltanschauung guides me still. It is the view that things wont get so bad that they cannot be handled. It is faith in a world that presents solutions to problems for those who put their shoulder into them and it is an abiding belief in the plain decency of the men and women you will come across in your life. The real core of this is the belief that we are the prime actors in our own lives, we can plot our own course by compass and good sense and we can still stand in child-like awe before the world's many splendored ways.
This should not be read as some variety of tossed off bootstrap-ism or the preaching of self-reliance as a cover for hardheartedness to the less fortunate. Instead I like to imagine that those lost writers of Boy's Life would have us ageing scouts find the beauty in the world and do our best to share it with others. All this occurred to me as I stood on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 12th Street, on my last morning in New York, drinking coffee, fogged in by my own steaming breath and just trying to slow down long enough to appreciate the coming day.
I am not so much trying to cheerlead for a world, which by any honest estimation, needs no additional plaudits for a full-throated song of itself. I am really urging everyone to have enough faith in us all to put yourself far enough out there to be vulnerable. Name your pictures after you friend's songs or the invention of Champagne or the Great Indian Uprising of 1881. Brush glitter from you hair, order from a menu in a foreign language, take the train to the end of the line and listen to the Russian news on a short-wave radio.
What I mean is this: if you find yourself looking at my pictures or anything else that might seem a bit enigmatic, just know that "Come Quick, I'm Tasting Stars" "A Life Forever Bright" "All Sights Point To Yes" or "Coney Island Steeple Chase" all mean something to me and if you slipped your merit badges back over your shoulder they might mean something to you too.
1 response
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Frank McMains said (13 Jul 2009):
That's fair, but I thought it was both a personal and how-to sort of piece in a light hearted way.
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