By photographing Boy Scouts, I’m exploring my own experience of uncoolness. I did a number of uncool things as a teenager, but Boy Scouting was the least cool. I knew how uncool it was even while staying involved long enough to become an Eagle Scout. My experience gives me a sense of reverence toward the boys. I strive to be sympathetic to their awkwardness. I feel a sense of obligation to protect the boys from pictures that would open them up to mockery by their friends or anyone else.
My relationship to the boys is in conflict with my relationship to the organization of Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts is the anti-cool, promoting action, usefulness, and earnestness. The typical picture of the “Boy Scout” is an archetype of male self-sufficiency, particularly through dominance over nature. Boy Scouts today are often boys who don’t fit into other contemporary male group activities, particularly sports.
Boy Scouting tries to protect boys from “liberal” values, while exposing them to a masculinity which demands that they give up essential parts of themselves. The boys in my pictures face a particular challenge: they are caught between their own desires and inclinations towards sweetness and the demands of Boy Scouts and the larger society that they toughen up.
Reverence towards the boys and their experience leads me to make sentimental images. My sentimental feelings towards the boys are warranted by the context in which I find them. Knowing that they are Boy Scouts, with all of the associated bravado and ‘50’s era masculinity, allows me to contemplate their sweetness without fear of lapsing into kitsch. My sentimentality is couched in a belief that the tenderness shown will not last long, possibly no longer than the moment it takes to record it. Recording it demonstrates the capacity of men to both feel and evoke sentimental emotions. I capture moments of stillness in which the boys are comfortable revealing themselves as soft within the hardness of Scouting and masculinity. I hope that these pictures will expand the definition of masculinity and subsequently expand the ways that men are allowed to act.