An interesting interview with a documentary photographer graced my dinner table tonight as I was grazing over some portobello mushrooms and black beans:

For me to photograph someone and not identify them suggests that either I didn't know them or that this individual is supposed to stand for lots and lots of people, and that in itself can be a very dehumanizing, undermining kind of representation. ... If I were to see an exhibition of migrant farm workers and not learn anyone's name, it would be the exhibition equivalent of driving by a field of migrant farm workers at seventy miles per hour.

—Tom Rankin, in the Duke Alumni Magazine, May–June 2003

I grew up in a house filled with images, and especially documentary photographs. There was never a label on any of these photographs, certainly not the name of the subject. Indeed, to have seen a caption on one of these would have seemed an oversimplification.

Here I have a black and white picture of two boys staring at the camera. They each have a certain look on their face, which I won't try to describe. They have certain clothes, a certain haircut. I know (because I know the photographer) that the picture was taken a few decades ago, and that it was probably taken in a small town in central West Virginia. The two boys both seem otherly, mysteriously different from me but also, I think, not to distant from my own childhood. They couldn't have been me (I would never hold still while a picture was taken, so private was I in my thoughts) but they could easily be boys that I played with: neighborhood kids, mischevious but friendly. One has his hands behind his back and his chin tilted down (Is he hiding something? A frog?). The other has his arms at his side and is looking more directly at the camera (Is he more trusting? Is he naive? Is he the real con-man?). If not neighborhood friends of mine, this could almost be a picture of my father and a friend—I know he ran more dangerously when he was young than he does in his present middle-aged sobriety. Or perhaps a picture of two kids that he knew. One of them ready to ask my father to close his eyes and open his mouth, only to put a frog on his tongue (as my father once did to his sister).

To know that they were "Tom Harris and Geoffrey Sanford," or whatever their names might have been, would have locked their meaning in, a little too sturdily for my imagination.

I'm interested in your thoughts on documentary photography and captioning, if you're up for a discussion.