







































 

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS AND CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE 

JAY MECHLING 

Children's folklorists do not always have the luxury of studying live children. 
Because children live largely in an oral, material, and customary world, 
leaving little written evidence (aside from the occasional diary or autograph 
book) of their worldviews, reconstructing the history of the everyday lives of 
children requires the creative use of what scant evidence we do have of their 
elusive worlds. Folklorists are accustomed to reconstructing the historical 
cultures of children using written materials, such as autobiographies, diaries, 
letters, ethnographic accounts dating back to the late 19th century, and other 
sources largely created by adults. Folklorists and historians also have learned 
to make creative use of the material culture of childhood in reconstructing 
the everyday lives of past children (e.g., Bronner 1999). We necessarily 
make a great many guesses about what the evidence really means, and we 
know that in most cases the evidence has gone through a great deal of 
editing, as adults ultimately are the gatekeepers for what evidence of 
children's lives survives and what perishes. 

The rise of photography after its invention in 1839 introduced a new 
genre of evidence of the everyday lives of people, and children have been the 
subjects of countless photographs since then. In what follows, I aim to 
examine what are sometimes called by dealers and collectors "found 
photographs" in order to discover how these snapshots might be used to help 
write the history of American children's lives, especially their folk cultures. 
First, I provide a bit of history of the photography of children and describe in 
more detail the nature of "found photographs." Then I briefly characterize the 
sorts of questions the folklorist would have about past children's lives, for my 
aim here is to treat the photographs as true evidence and not merely as pretty 
pictures accompanying generalizations of the sort we make from other sorts 
of historical evidence. Finally, I offer some close readings of a few 
representative snapshots I have collected as of this writing. That final section 
amounts to a test of the proposition that snapshots actually might teach us 
something new about American children's folklore. 

Children's folklorists share with, historians, sociologists, and 
anthropologists the desire to understand children's cultures on their own 
terms, but I believe folklorists are especially inclined to brush aside as best as 
possible the adult contaminations of our evidence of children's lives. 
Photographs are especially seductive evidence in trying to recreate the 
autonomous worlds of children, and with proper caution scholars can use 
photographs to see what might otherwise go unseen. At the same time, 
photographs seduce us into believing what we are seeing. I provide here 



 

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

only a beginning for navigating these tough issues of evidence, authority, 
authenticity, power, and subversion in found photographs of children. 

Photographs of Children 

The earliest photographs of children, given the bulky technology and 
the long exposure times required by that technology, are usually set in 
studios. These have some value as historical evidence in that photographic 
studio portraits borrowed from painted portraits certain conventions, which 
in the case of children meant that the photographic portraits often include 
toys and the more formal dress for children. In many cases these probably 
were toys and other props provided by the photographer, so it is hard to sort 
out those photographs where a child is holding or otherwise posed with a 
favorite toy. The clothes in these studio portraits are, one presumes, chosen 
by the adults and do not necessarily (or likely) represent the everyday dress 
of children. 

Studio portraits fulfilled the family's need for more formal images, but 
the 1890s saw an explosion of stereoviews, from commercially produced 
sets to snapshot-like views taken by those amateurs who could afford a 
stereoscopic camera and developing. Many of these stereoviews are still set 
in the studio, but George Eastman's invention of the gelatin dry plate in 1878 
freed the photographer from the constricting limits of the earlier technology 
and made it possible for the photographer to move outside. Most stereoviews 
were still posed, though collectors find the occasional one-of-a-kind 
snapshot-like stereoview. There is a very interesting history of adult views 
of children that could be written using stereoviews as the texts; briefly, we 
can note that some of these photographs captured some of the folklore and 
other dimensions of children's everyday lives. Frozen in the images of these 
stereoviews are children's more formal games, such as Maypoles and Blind 
Man's Bluff, and play with toys, but the stereoviews also record more 
informal play in snow and sand, for example. 

Professional art and commercial photography in the late 19th century 
and well into the 20th still operated from the romantic era view of the 
innocent child (Higonnet 1998). The adults' romantic view of childhood crept 
into more documentary views of children's lives. To be sure, a social realist 
strain of the documentary photography of children-practiced by Lewis Hine, 
Jacob Riis, James Agee and others-has had its place up to 
the present, but in the wake of World War II many photographers of children 
seemed to adopt the ideological position so evident in the famous "Family of 
Man" exhibit Edward Steichen created for the Museum of Modern Art in 
1955 (see Sandeen 1995), namely, that all human beings share a universal 
human nature and that children everywhere are inherently 

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innocent. Barbara Morgan's 1951 photographic essay, Summer's Children, 
for example, seems driven by this ideology as she documents kids at summer 
camp. These two traditions in documentary photography-some showing 
children innocently at play in middle-class, benign settings and some 
showing disadvantaged children (still innocent) in some of the most squalid 
settings-have co-existed for the past seventy-five years or so. 

Some of this documentary and art photography does reveal a bit of 
children's worlds under their own control. Salinger's photo essay of teenagers 
in their bedrooms, for example, is wonderfully provocative for those scholars 
interested in the material culture of teens, but Salinger's only use of words 
are the kids' brief self-descriptions; she bypasses the opportunity to analyze 
the larger meanings of the visual and oral testimony. Similarly, Lauren 
Greenfield's two color photo essays--Fast Forward (1997) and Girl Culture 
(2002)--give voice to the teens themselves without offering much analysis of 
what we are to make of these affluent kids and their worlds. The 
photographer winks knowingly at us, as a sort of postmodern joke between 
photographer and audience, but also some true affection for the subjects 
comes through, just as in Bruce Weber's Branded Youth: And Other Stories 
(1997). Weber, like Andy Warhol before him, straddles the already fuzzy 
art/commercial photography boundary to offer a photoessay wherein punks 
and Boy Scouts seem equally freaky and wherein Weber seems to love them 
all in a Warholian, postmodern move that refuses to judge and refuses to 
make distinctions. 

All of these photoessays, and more, are produced by professional, adult 
photographers who aim to say something profound about the lives of children 
and adolescents in contemporary American culture. These, really, are not the 
texts for my analysis here, but the whole constellation of photographs of 
children serve as a contextual background for what does interest me here--
namely, the snapshot, the found photograph. 

Snapshots of Children 

George Eastman's invention of the gelatin dry plate in 1878 made the 
true snapshot possible. In 1888 Eastman introduced his Kodak Camera No.1, 
the first portable camera containing a roll of film that would take one 
hundred shots developed as 2-1/2 inch round images. The amateur 
photographer would send the whole camera back to Eastman, who developed 
the roll and sent back the developed prints and the camera loaded with a new 
roll of film. In 1889, Eastman brought out Kodak Camera No.2, which 
produced larger (3-1/2 inches diameter), still round prints (King 1964, 6). It 
was then possible for the amateur photographer to create what came to be 
called "snapshots," borrowing for photography 

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a term that described the hunting shot hurriedly taken in the field 
(Kouwenhoven 1982, 161-62). 

What collectors and dealers call "found photographs" are plentiful and 
perplexing. These are the snapshots that we find at yard sales, at estate sales, 
at vintage photography shows, and on the Internet in online auctions and on 
the sites of dealers in vernacular photography. These are orphaned 
photographs usually tom from their original contexts; they no longer live as 
texts interacting with human memories. Now they are objects for collectors 
with a variety of tastes and aims. Unless there is writing on the back ("real 
photo" postcards often have a full message and were mailed), a date 
included as part of the printing process, or some internal clue to place and 
time, we often are forced to guess where and when the snapshot was taken. 
These snapshots sometimes are of poor quality, as the amateur misjudges the 
light and the shadows, blurs the image with the camera or with film too slow 
to capture a moment in motion, frames the picture oddly, accidentally 
creates a double exposure, or commits any number of other "errors" that 
help signal an image as a snapshot (King 1964, 4957). At the same time, 
these telltale signs of the snapshot also help certify the authenticity of the 
moment; its spontaneous, unposed, candid, opportunistic qualities help 
persuade the viewer that the image captures a "true" moment in time and 
perhaps a "truth" about the subject. 

A very few scholars have begun the work of using snapshots to write the 
history of children's lives. The most important to date is Thompson and 
Austin's massive 2003 work, America’s Children: Picturing Childhood from 
Early America to the Present. Using a range of sorts of photographs of 
children, some by professional photographers but also many "found" 
snapshots, the authors "read" these photographs as evidence for writing the 
history of American children's lives. Rather than following a simple 
chronological scheme for organizing the photographs and commentary, the 
authors present thematic chapters around family life, mobility, community, 
work, learning, play, and courtship and marriage. 

There are billions of snapshots of children out there in the world. I have 
at hand a small sample of these for the analysis I present here, though I have 
looked at enough snapshots at antique fairs, vintage photography shows, and 
on the Internet to have a firm grasp of what the genre has to offer. My 
generalizations have to be modest and provisional. There is also a bias in my 
sample toward snapshots of boys, as this project arose out of my research on 
the Boy Scouts and on the larger question of the social construction of 
masculinity in boys and young men (see Mechling 2001). And, of course, the 
snapshots at hand have survived editing of one sort or another. People have 
made choices about which snapshots to save and which to discard; dealers 
select snapshots deemed interesting enough to sell, sometimes poring 
through hundreds of thousands of snapshots to 

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yield a few hundred images. And for my own collection I have chosen to buy 
some images and not others. So there is cultural bias galore in these existing 
snapshots. Still, they have an oddly powerful grip on the collector, as we gaze 
into the faces of these kids now aged or dead. 

Before examining the genre, we have to acknowledge at the outset that 
most snapshots of children and youth very likely have been taken by adults. 
Kids have had access to cameras across the 20th century, and doubtless some 
surviving snapshots have been taken by kids, especially in settings such as 
schools, playgrounds, summer camps, and neighborhood play spaces. Some 
researchers actually teach children how to use cameras and analyze the sorts 
of visual conventions and topics the kids adopt in using snapshots to capture 
their everyday lives and to communicate with other kids and with adults 
something about their kids' worlds (e.g., Ewald 1985, 2000; Hubbard 1991, 
1994; and Padilla 2002). We even have snapshots of kids with cameras, so 
we know that some images from the past were captured by children and 
youth. 

One sort of kid with a camera, of course, is the school yearbook 
photographer, and yearbook pictures are a surprisingly neglected source of 
information about the cultures of teens. In the United States, yearbooks tend 
to capture the worlds of adolescents, generally kids twelve and older, teens in 
junior high and senior high schools. Yearbook photography includes three 
sorts of photos-posed pictures (individual portraits plus pictures of classes, 
clubs, sports teams, performing arts groups, formal 
events, and so on), action shots (e,g, sports), and "candid" snapshots of 
students in less formal and usually unposed contexts. Yearbook photography 
works under adult supervision and surveillance, usually, so there are several 
layers of censoring behind each "candid" snapshot published in a yearbook. 
Still, these photographs capture teens in some unguarded moments and, 
presumably, represent a version of the "story" of going to that school as seen 
from the students' viewpoint. The historian always hopes that someone 
"cleaning house" in an organization did not throwaway the invaluable 
evidence the historian is looking for, and one wonders how many boxes of 
old yearbook snapshots (or contact sheets of negative strips) are out there in 
boxes and file cabinets. The folklore historian would be especially interested 
in the photographs that were not selected for publication, photographs that 
did not get through the self-censoring and adult censoring processes because 
they are photos judge inappropriate or even disruptive. 

The one island in this sea of general neglect of yearbook photographs is 
a little-known book, School Spirit (2003), by Pierre Huyghe and Douglas 
Coupland, who is perhaps the quintessential Generation X novelist. In this 
quirky, but fascinating, book, the authors (compilers, really) use real 
California high school yearbook pictures and inscriptions to create a quite 

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open and ambiguous narrative about life for high-schoolers, which is to say 
that Huyghe and Coupland provide no meta-narrative of their own other than 
the order of photographs and handwritten texts from the yearbooks. Coupland 
must have been working on this book at the same time he was writing his 
novel, Hey, Nostradamus! A Novel (2003), a postmodern fiction telling the 
story of a Columbine-like school shooting. Coupland comes no closer than do 
filmmakers Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine, 2002) and Gus van Sant 
(Elephant, 2003) in understanding what was going on in the worlds of the 
perpetrators and victims of the Columbine High School massacre and similar 
shootings, but I think School Sprit is an attempt to do visually what Coupland 
attempts to do in his novel. 

The value in School Spirit lies in its suggestion that coded somewhere in 
high school yearbook pictures are the answers to questions adults have been 
asking about teenagers for some time now. I am not prepared to explore this 
lead here and now, but I hope an army of folklorists and historians gets out 
into the schools to rescue this photographic record from oblivion. 

Returning to the body of snapshots we know are available, what can 
be said of the found photos with children's lives as the subject? Most of these 
snapshots of kids and teens hold few surprises. Setting aside the posed 
photographs of kids with families, often in front of the family home or car or 
on a family vacation, the snapshots that capture kids' play and rituals tend to 
feature familiar scenes. Birthday parties, First Communion, Halloween 
costumes, playing in the sand at a beach, playing with the electric train under 
the Christmas tree, posing outside with the new bike, and playing with a 
family pet are common images. Yet, among these images are a few that I 
think can be used as texts for revealing something about children's folklore, 
and in offering close readings of a few of these I hope to provoke folklorists 
and historians into making more of found photographs. First, though, I need 
to inquire what we think we know and don't know about children's folklore, 
for it would be unanswered questions that would be the only justification for 
taking found snapshots seriously as historical evidence. 

What's Missing in Our Knowledge of Children's Folklore? 

What do we think we know about American children's folklore? 
Although we have earlier accounts of children's games and play, some of 
which are still useful today for recognizing the continuities and 
discontinuities in children's play, I would have to say that the modern (maybe 
postmodern, a topic for another time) study of American children's folklore 
began in the mid-l970s, in large part in response to the emergence 

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of the performance paradigm in folklore studies. (The mid-1970s also saw 
the emergence of the animal rights movement, and I believe that the two 
movements are connected, though that also is a topic for another time.) 
Independent initiatives in the University of Texas, Indiana University, and 
the University of Pennsylvania graduate programs in Folklore sent a good 
many graduate students into the field to study children's folklore in 
performance, and from then on the study of children's folklore seems to have 
split into two strands, the one still operating from a text-base approach and 
the other committed to studying children's performances of folklore in 
natural contexts. By the mid-1980s that second, ethnographic strand, had 
also come under the influence of the postmodern approach to ethnography, 
especially the view that objective, scientific ethnography was not possible. 
Many ethnographers in several disciplines made this "linguistic turn," but the 
epistemological questions were especially relevant and vexing for those of us 
who conduct fieldwork-based study of children. Children's worlds are 
inaccessible to us in so many ways that we understand more than most 
folklorists, I think, the tentative and provisional nature of our generalizations 
about children. 

When, in that mid-1980s period of upheaval in the epistemological basis 
for studying the lives of other people, I came to write a chapter on 
"Children's Folklore" for Elliott Oring's textbook, Folk Groups and Folklore 
Genres (1986), I attempted to generalize about American children's folklore 
by alerting readers to certain themes in the lore they might observe, themes 
like power and the child's body as a symbol of the society. I wrote then about 
some binary tensions in children's folklore--order/disorder, 
hierarchy/equality, male/female, and dynamism/ conservatism ("Newell's 
Paradox," as Gary Alan Fine [1980] named it)and I recommended a 
Batesonian approach to the paradoxes of play in children's folklore (see 
Bateson 1972). 

I wrote that essay nearly twenty years ago, and in thinking what I might 
change if I revised that essay today, I would add a much more thorough 
section on the ways folklore and popular culture continuously fold back upon 
one another, proving every day the point of Newell's Paradox-namely, that 
children's folklore is simultaneously very dynamic in its content and very 
conservative in its forms. I touched on this point only slightly in the 1986 
essay, but I have come to think of this interaction between mass-mediated, 
commercial, popular culture produced with kids and teens in mind as the 
consuming audience, on the one hand, and children's and teens' folk cultures 
on the other as one of the most important set of relationships in 
understanding children's everyday cultures. Commodity culture endlessly 
appropriates children's folklore and sells the folklore back to the children, 
but children's folklore endlessly 

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appropriates popular culture and uses that culture for the children's own 
motives. 

Several things have changed or, at least, accelerated in American 
culture since 1986. First, it has become clear that kids and their cultures 
have become the sites for political battles in the adult "culture wars" (see 
Hunter 1991). Second, adult panic over kids' popular culture has led parents, 
teachers, politicians, and others to blame the violent and sexual content of a 
great deal of mass media aimed at kids for a range of social evils, including 
the murder of children by children, teen suicide, gang rapes, and the series 
of school shootings in the last half of the 1990s and into this century (see the 
special section on "Folklore Responds to Columbine and Adolescence" in 
the Children s Folklore Review in 2002). Third, the mass-mediated cultural 
products aimed at kids and teens shows signs of belonging to a global, 
international culture. In the most visible example, manga (graphic novels, 
comic) and animé (cartoon versions of the manga) created initially for 
Japanese audiences now find voracious consumers among children, teens, 
and young adults in the United States. What are the implications of the 
Internet and other globalizing forces on the folk cultures of children? 

So the workings of Newell's Paradox in the dialectic between children's 
folk cultures and the mass-mediated, popular, commercial cultural 
commodities produced for youthful consumers is the first new, real question I 
expect the found photographs to help illuminate. The second open question in 
the study of children's folklore has to do with "dark play" (Sutton-Smith & 
Kelly-Byrne 1984) or "dirty play" (Fine 1988). Both sorts of play challenge 
adult notions of the innocence of children. "Dark play" is the phrase Sutton-
Smith and Kelly-Byrne use to describe play that relies on some degree of 
danger or transgression for its pleasure, a form of play more likely found in 
older children and teens. "Dirty play" is Fine's phrase for the transgressive 
play of children, especially if it involves forbidden words and actions. 

"Dark play" and "dirty play" usually take place away from adult 
surveillance, so we should not have high hopes that snapshots will capture a 
great deal of such play. Polaroid and digital photography bypass many of the 
possibilities for adult censorship, so it might be that there will be an 
increasing number of available images recording dark and dirty play. Still, 
existing snapshots point in some interesting ways to transgressive play and 
traditions, as I shall show. 

A third sort of question about children's folklore and folklife that 
snapshots might address has to do with gestural culture and proxemics. 
Moving pictures (film or video) are the best media for capturing how 
children move their bodies in space, how they position themselves in relation 
to playmates, how they touch or don't touch other children, and 

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so on, but still photography can capture some of the ways children use bodies 
and space, and snapshots of children reach much farther back into history 
than do home movies and home video. 

Finally, it seems to me that snapshots might help write the history of 
children's emotional lives. Emotions are fundamentally human (probably 
fundamentally mammalian), but cultures shape human emotions, socializing 
fear, jealousy, love, anger, sadness, grief, and so on into forms the cultures 
deem acceptable and minimally likely to disrupt social relations. Historian 
Peter N. Stearns almost single-handedly created the interdisciplinary field of 
"the history of emotions," but he and others have relied almost exclusively on 
written evidence to chronicle the history of the socialization of particular 
emotions across time and space (e.g., Stearns and Stearns 1986). The family 
is the primary setting for the socialization of emotions, the setting where a 
child learns, for example, how to express or repress anger. Children's folk 
groups certainly must be another site for the socialization of emotions, and it 
is possible (as is so often the case) that the socialization in the children's 
group resists and undermines the socialization in the family. In any case, 
since we have good reasons to believe that facial expressions, gestures, and 
other visual cues signal a person's emotional condition, we would expect 
snapshots to provide some sort of evidence of the contexts for the emotional 
lives of children. 

Some other issues in children's folklore and folklife will arise as I 
discuss particular images below, but this list of four sorts of questionsabout 
popular culture, about dark and dirty play, about proxemics, and about the 
socialization of emotions-helps orient the analysis to come. Note that in all 
four cases we have very little historical evidence reflecting the children's 
point of view. Snapshots might be our only evidence for some insights about 
children's everyday lives. 

All of this hope I bear for the usefulness of snapshots for understanding 
the everyday lives of American children in the past relies upon "reading" the 
photographs. This matter of "how to read" photographic images is the subject 
ofa great deal of useful criticism (e.g., Chalfen 1975,1987,1991; King 1984; 
Ohm and Bell 1975; Ibson 2002). When we look at any snapshot, we tend to 
read meaning into it from the nonverbal clues the image offers. We draw 
upon our experiences with other images and the history of our interpretive 
successes and failures-as, for example, when we may have misread a facial 
expression. These readings of found photographs involve a great deal of 
speculation, but then (I would argue) so does the folklorist's observation of a 
live folk performance in context. The inner meanings of the immediate event 
for the participants are no more accessible to us, really, than are the meanings 
to the participants of an event photographed a hundred years ago. Still, these 
are not wild guesses but may be reasonable and persuasive interpretations of 
the 

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meanings of the event captured in a snapshot. Let me illustrate some of the 
interpretive possibilities with a few select snapshots. 

Children's Lives in Snapshots 

Up to this point I have laid out some issues we should be on lookout for 
as we peruse found photographs for evidence of children's everyday folk 
lives, but rather than organize the remainder of this essay according to these 
analytical categories, I prefer to work instead from a sample of interesting 
and provocative snapshots in my collection, always on the lookout for the 
more theoretical issues I have laid out. When I choose to buy a found 
photograph, I am drawing upon these issues in finding a photograph 
"interesting," but I am also open to being surprised by a photograph that taps 
some issues I had not expected. This is why it is best to begin with some 
compelling snapshots. The sample photos and the interpretive comments I 
offer here are illustrative, meant to be suggestive and provocative rather than 
definitive and comprehensive. With these qualifications in mind, let us look 
at some actual snapshots. 

Some photographs serve the text-based approach to the history of 
children's folklore, as in snapshots that capture a traditional game or a 
calendrical custom, for example. As we gaze at the real photo postcard (Fig. 
1) of a school playground in 1912, we recognize that the very nature of 
photography is to capture a brief moment in time, a micro-second slice of the 
continual flow of everyday life. Seeing such photographs adds a visual 
memory and impact to the historical point that, say, children have played the 
traditional game of Red Rover across time and space. Now in 
our mind's eye we can put real faces and settings to a past performance of the 
game. But the photographs seem poor evidence for a performancebased 
approach to children's folklore in context. In this real photo postcard, for 
example, we do not know if the girls chose to play the ring game or were 
directed to do so by an adult. We do not have the contextual background for 
this playground scene that Linda Hughes (1993) had, for example, in her 
ethnographic study of the game of Four Square as it was played by the same 
kids over several months' time. We do not know the players, their 
relationships, or the other information we would need to answer the 
characteristic folklorist's question (based on Kenneth Burke's pentad-see 
Rueckert 1982): Who performed what traditional item of folklore, how, for 
what audience, in what time and place, for what reasons, and what was the 
outcome? The photograph does suggest some things about gender segregation 
on the playground and children's clothing for a time period, but that is about 
the extent of information we're going to glean from this photograph. 

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But other photographs suggest thicker interpretations might be possible. 
Let me narrow my gaze to snapshots revealing boys' everyday folk lives, 
with the understanding that we could put the same fine lens on girls' folk 
cultures and on a mix of the two. Masculinity studies generally agree that the 
social construction of masculinity in cultures across time and space is a 
fragile project, and that a good many observable features of boys' and men's 
group cultures arise as adaptive responses to this fragility. For western 
middle-class cultures like ours, the emotional structure of the nuclear family 
and the fact that mothers have primary care of young children lead to a 
developmental circumstance in which boys must separate from the mother 
and identify masculinity as "not female." One's masculinity must be proven 
constantly, and cracks in the male façade must be repaired quickly and 
effectively. This leads to certain features of male friendship group cultures, 
including stylized aggression, hierarchy, misogyny, the deprecation of men 
perceived to be too feminine (in some contexts full homophobia), and a 
tendency to communicate relationships through "doing side-by-side" rather 
than through speech. There is a "boy code" enforced largely by a shame 
culture (Pollack 1999). 

I think some snapshots help us see the workings and affective impact of 
these features of growing up male in the United States. For one thing, unlike 
formal, posed portraits, snapshots show us the everyday dress of boys and 
how boys used their clothing and hairstyles to perform masculinity in a 
particular social, cultural, and historical context. This snapshot of a teenage 
boy (Fig. 2), probably from the 1940s or early 1950s, features the wide-rolled 
dungaree cuffs necessary for the performance of a "cool" masculinity. The 
squared body language and the direct stare into the camera by the young man 
standing in front of the car is aggressive and confrontational, and even his 
hairstyle connotes challenge. He frames his genitals with two hands, fingers 
spread for added attention, intensifying this male performance. 

The automobile in that photograph signals a common convention in 
American snapshots. Americans love their cars, and kids of all ages can be 
found posing in front of or in the family car. In some cases-this is one, I 
suppose-the car actually belongs to the teenager. This American infatuation 
with the automobile-an affection that tells us much about American culture, 
as lots of scholarship has shown-extends to kids, often photographed playing 
with cars and trucks or, more interestingly, posed in a commercially 
produced pedal car or, more interesting still, some version of a home-made 
car. These snapshots range from the more formal "boxcar derby" cars (Fig. 3) 
to the far more ad hoc constructions from scavenged parts, evidence of a 
continuing tradition of bricolage among boys. 

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Some snapshots capture kids in the process of making things or even 
constructing folk playthings (Fig. 4). Snapshots of kids of both sexes 
building castles and other forms in sand on the beach (Fig. 5) confirm one 
important point-namely, that kids' folk constructions tend to follow what 
Robert Plant Armstrong (1981) calls an aesthetic of syndesis rather than the 
aesthetic of synthesis we are used to in western art. Working from a 
syncretic aesthetic, kids create things through addition and accretion such 
that creations might never be finished. As kids get older, the great 
preponderance of snapshots with constructions are of boys. Sometimes 
(Figs. 6, 7) the constructions are of materials provided by the commercial 
culture-another instance of Newell's Paradox at work-while in other cases 
the constructions demonstrate the bricolage we see in the folk constructions 
of playthings, such as this raft (Fig. 8). 

Some snapshots provide fascinating, concrete detail to the 
generalizations we make about boys' friendship groups. For example, some 
of the photos of boys building things capture the point made by Pollack 
(1999) and others who write about boy cultures that boys often express and 
experience closeness through engaging in activities "side by side." Whereas 
girls more often favor face-to-face play and come to understand intimacy as 
requiring face-to-face communication, boys tend to rely upon "doing side-
by-side" as an expression of intimacy. Some scholars make a sociobiological 
argument that boys experience face-to-face gazes from other boys as 
aggressive, as an invitation either to fight or to back down, so that 
expressions of intimacy between boys generally avoid the face-to 
face contact. And, as Bateson notes, the very act of sharing a frame--such as 
"we're building this raft together"--communicates to the participants in the 
frame important things about their relationships. 

Just like the male gaze, male touching must be managed in the 
friendship group. In general, boys touch each other only in stylized ways, 
such as playfighting. One of things we see in some snapshots is rough-and-
tumble play. This 1957 snapshot (Fig. 9) of eight early teens boys on what 
must be a school playground in Southern California speaks volumes; the 
racial mix here--at least black, white, and Asian--is unusual for the time 
period, but the photo also confirms the view that touching between males in 
American society must be framed very carefully as heterosexual. Touching 
in the frame of some sort of "horseplay," for example, is permissible. In fact, 
a number of the snapshots in my collection of rough-and-tumble play by 
boys will not reproduce well here for publication because their blurry focus 
is a product of a spontaneous action barely caught by the photographer. More 
problematic than rough touching are the less aggressive ways boys touch 
each other in snapshots portraying friends in an affectionate embrace (Fig. 
10). It is interesting that Internet auction sellers often insert the phrase "gay 
interest" in the description of 

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MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

a snapshot of two boys or men posing with their arms around each other in a 
clearly affectionate embrace. How to sort out affection between two 
heterosexual males and between two homosexual males is not easy from the 
appearance of this touching alone, and heterosexual male friends constantly 
must construct and maintain a frame that the touching is not sexual while still 
powerfully emotional. These matters are highly contextual, of course, as 
conventions of male touching and the meanings of those conventions change 
over time, across ethnicity and social class, and across social contexts (e.g., 
all male settings versus mixed groups). John Ibson's (2002) study of the 
changing conventions of such touching in snapshots of men (some of which 
Ibson knew, through their provenance, were of gay men) deals mainly with 
males college age and older, but if we were to write a similar snapshot history 
of boys we would find the same ambiguities, albeit with a much larger 
proportion of the snapshots capturing touching framed as horseplay. 

Many of these points about the ways boys relate to each other physically 
are made in a photographic album in my possession. An album often provides 
context and narrative flow missing for a single found photograph. This is an 
"orphan album" in that the dealer from whom I purchased it on eBay could 
not provide any information about its provenance. In more than two hundred 
photos, the album records high country mountain hiking and camping trips 
stretching from February to September (and maybe beyond) in 1938. The 
photos for the first three fourths of the album have captions recorded in white 
ink on the black pages, and it seems clear from the captions for the many 
mountains and lakes in the photos that these are the Cascade Mountains of 
Oregon and Washington. Nine to a dozen boys and young men appear in 
group photos, sometimes just in pairs, and sometimes doing more than 
posing-such as cooking, eating, fishing, and swimming. 

In the posed, group photos these boys and men are hanging on each other 
just as we see in so many group photos. We also find some horseplay, such as 
this snapshot (Fig. 11) of boys having a playfight with knives, and, late in the 
album, photos of a group of younger boys swimming and huddling around 
campfires, Spread throughout the album are photos taken during "skinny 
dipping" swims in the mountain lakes and streams (Fig. 12), and the naked 
bodies remind us that one sort of framed, safe intimacy between boys and 
men is expressed through casual nudity in each others' presence. 

I also have in my possession a remarkable set of negatives of a Cub 
Scout Den and Pack (a collection of the smaller Dens). The pictures of the 
Pack record a banquet, with each Den's boys and his parents sitting together 
by Den. Judging from the women's clothing and hairstyles, I would guess that 
these photos are from the 1940s or early 1950s. The 

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FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

photos of the Pack banquet are not what is so remarkable about the 
collection, however. Dens typically prepare skits for such Pack gatherings. (I 
was a Cub Scout in the 1950s and my mother was a "Den Mother," so I 
know this world.) Amongst the pictures of the Pack gathering are pictures of 
these white Cub Scouts dressed in blackface and white gloves, clearly 
prepared to perform a minstrelsy skit (Fig. 13). We know well the racism 
embodied in minstrel shows, and we also know well the racially segregated 
world of the 1940s and 1950s when these Cub Scouts were growing up. But 
even this knowledge does not prepare the viewer fifty-some years later for 
the jolting impact of seeing these eight- or nine-year old white boys 
performing blackface minstrelsy. In this case, no written historical record or 
testimony can convey the alarming mix of innocence and social evil 
captured in these photographs, just as some lynching photographs slap us 
when we see children in the crowd of onlookers laughing, posing, and even 
gathering souvenirs (Allen, Als, Lewis, and Litwack 2003). The 
lynching photographs seem like "dark play," but can we say the same of the 
Cub Scout minstrels? Possibly. 

Also in this category of white children dressing up as something they are 
not are the photographs of kids "playing Indian." Such snapshots are plentiful, 
and they reinforce our understanding of the power of such play for white 
children in the 20th century. Adults created youth organizations based on 
"Indian Lore" almost as soon as real Native Americans were no longer a 
threat (Mechling 1980, Deloria 1999), but the snapshots show how pervasive 
was "playing Indian" in the informal, folk play of kids (Fig. 14). 

This snapshot (Fig. 15) of young kids playing with guns also counts as 
dark play. I think most adult viewers would have shuddered a bit at this 
snapshot even before the Columbine and other school shootings, but in the 
post-Columbine world, where kids have become demonized and are 
scrutinized closely to see who is the next sociopath to bring an arsenal to 
school, it is impossible to view this snapshot without invoking those 
meanings. In fact, there is good reason to believe that a great deal of "dark 
play" by kids and teens involves firearms. At the same time, in other contexts 
snapshots of children holding guns would not be dark play but merely 
evidence of the socialization of boys and girls into the hunting cultures of 
their fathers and mothers (Mechling 2004). 

There is no logical place to stop with examples, so let me end with a 
snapshot showing a moment of hazing (Fig. 16). This snapshot from 1941 
shows the very public paddling of a fraternity pledge, one assumes, as part of 
the hazing process for bringing new members into the fraternity. College 
students are no longer children, in most cases, but children's folklorists easily 
extend "childhood and adolescence" into the college years because they find 
so many continuities between adolescent folklore 

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MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

and college student folklore. In the case of hazing, high school and college 
fraternities haze pledges as a more formal version of the informal hazing 
quite common in male friendship groups, where a young man must pass a 
"test" to show himself worthy of belonging to the group. Hazing-which is 
now generally outlawed by colleges and by the national offices of 
fraternities, but still practiced nonetheless-has its private moments and its 
public moments, and both sorts of moments have been captured in snapshots. 
Snapshots capturing public moments of hazing (as in Fig. 16) remind us that 
this was not "dark play" but socially recognized and accepted "fun" for boys 
of certain ages. In more private contexts away from public scrutiny, 
humiliation, power, dominance, submission, shame, nudity, and even some 
homoerotic moments show up in hazing, and a vernacular photographic 
record of the hazing appears to play an important role in marking the 
moments and in "remembering" them (an accidentally wonderful word in 
this context, given the uses of the photographs to rehearse again the 
conversion of a pledge into a "member" of the group) once the pledge can 
look back fondly upon hazing as a test passed. The now infamous 
photographs, made public in the spring of 2004, of the humiliating treatment 
of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in the Abu Gharib prison seem 
familiar to the folklorist who knows the male folk culture of the military. 
Some commentators have blamed Internet sadomasochistic pornography 
sites as the sources of the visual tableaux that led the American soldiers to 
pose the Iraqi prisoners in certain positions and nude; but any folklorist of 
male cultures knows it is fraternity and military boot camp hazing, not 
pornography, that provides the visual commonplaces re-enacted in the prison 
photos. This is disturbing dark play, but it has a long pedigree. 

CONCLUSION 

As these examples demonstrate, found photographs provide a potentially 
rich body of evidence for writing the history of children's everyday lives, 
especially their folklore. In the case of boys, the bulk of my examples, the 
vernacular photographic record is invaluable in reconstructing the rich 
nonverbal worlds of boys' friendship groups. Nearly thirty years ago in a 
special issue of Folklore Forum a group of folklorists attempted to alert their 
colleagues to the value of photographs as evidence of folklore as a form of 
visual communication (Ohm and Bell, eds. 1975). 

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FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

It is time that we return to that invitation and mine this evidence for all it 
reveals. 

WORKS CITED 

Allen, James, Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack. 2003. Without 
Sanctuary: Lynching Photographs in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms 
Publishers. 

Armstrong, Robert Plant. 1981. The Powers of Presence: Consciousness. Myth, 
 and Affecting Presence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. "A Theory of Play and Fantasy [1955]." In Steps to an 
 Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, 177-93. New York: 
 Ballantine. 
Bronner, Simon J. 1999. "Material Folk Culture of Children." In Children s 
 Folklore: A Sourcebook, ed. Brian Sutton-Smith et al., 251-71. Logan: Utah 
 State University Press. 
______, ed. 2002. Special Section on "Folklore Responds to Columbine and 
 Adolescence." Children s Folklore Review 24 (1& 2): 7-63. 
Chalfen, Richard. 1975. "Introduction to the Study of Non-Professional 
 Photography as Visual Communication." In Saying Cheese: Studies in 
 Folklore and Visual Communication, ed. Stephen Ohm and Michael E. Bell, 
 19-25. Folklore Forum No. 13. Bloomington: The Folklore Institute, Indiana 
 University. 
_______. 1987. Snapshot Versions of Life: Explorations of Home Mode Photography. 
 Bowling Green, OH: The Popular Press. 
_______. 1991. Turning Leaves: The Photographic Collections of Two Japanese 

American Families. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.  
Coupland, Douglas. 2003. Hey, Nostradamus! A Novel. New York: Bloomsbury. 
Deloria, Philip J. 1999. Playing Indian: Otherness and Authenticity in the 
 Assumption of American Indian Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University 
 Press. 
Ewald, Wendy. 1985. Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children 
 of the Appalachians. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc. 
_____. 2000. Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969-1999. 
 Zurich: Scalo. 
Fine, Gary Alan. 1980. "Children and Their Culture: Exploring Newell's Paradox." 

Western Folklore 39: 170-83. 
______. 1988. "Good Children and Dirty Play." Play and Culture 1:43-56.  
Goffman, Erving. 1976. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper & Row. 
Greenfield, Lauren. 1997. Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of 

 Hollywood. NY: Knopf. 
_________. Girl Culture. 2002. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 
Higonnet, Anne. 1998. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal 

 Childhood. London: Thames and Hudson. 
Hubbard, Jim. 1991. Shooting Back: A Photographic View of Life By Homeless 

 Children. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 
_________.1994. Shooting Backfrom the Reservation: A Photographic View of Life by 
 Native American Youth. New York: The New Press. 

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Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. 
 New York: Basic Books. 
Hughes, Linda. 1993. "'You Have to Do It with Style': Girls' Games and Girls' 
 Gaming." In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, ed. By T. Hollis, L. 

Pershing, and M.J. Young, 130-48. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 
Huyghe, Pierre, and Douglas Coupland. 2003. School Spirit. Paris: Encounters.  
Ibson, John. 2002. Picturing Men. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
King, Graham. 1984. Say "Cheese"! Looking at Snapshots in a New Way. New 
 York; Dodd, Mead & Co. 
Kouwenhoven, John A. 1982. Half a Truth is Better Than None. Chicago: 
 University of Chicago Press. 
Mechling, Jay. 1980. '''Playing Indian' and the Search for Authenticity in Modern 
 White America." In Prospects 5: An Annual Review of American Cultural 

Studies, ed. Jack Salzman, 17-33. New York: Burt Franklin Company. 
________.1986. "Children's Folklore." In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres, ed. 
 Elliott Oring, 91-120. Logan: Utah State University Press. 
________. 2001. On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American  

Youth.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  
________. 2004. "Picturing Hunting." Western Folklore 63:1/2,51-78.  
Morgan, Barbara. 1951. Summer s Children: A Photographic Cycle of Life at 
 Camp. Scarsdale, NY: Morgan & Morgan, Publishers. 
Ohm, Stephen, and Michael E. Bell, eds. 1975. Saying Cheese: Studies in Folklore 
 and Visual Communication. Folklore Forum no. 13. Bloomington: Folklore 
 Institute, Indiana University. 
Padilla, AI. 2002. Reality from the Barrio: The Photography and Prose of Native 
 Santa Fe Youth, from Censorship to Survival. Santa Fe, NM: Santa Fe Boys 
 & Girls Club. 
Pollack, William. 1999. Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sonsfrom the Myths of Boyhood. 
 New York: Henry Holt and Company. 
Rueckert, William H. 1982. Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations. 
 2nd., ed; Berkeley: University of California Press. 
Salinger, Adrienne. 1995. My Room: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms. San Francisco: 
 Chronicle Books. 
Sandeen, Eric. 1995. Picturing and Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s 
 America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 
Stearns, Carol Zisowitz, and Peter N. Stearns, 1986. Anger: The Struggle for 
 Emotional Control in America s History. Chicago: University of Chicago 
 Press. 
Sutton-Smith, Brian, and Diana Kelly-Byrne, eds. 1984. The Masks of Play. West 
 Point, NY: Leisure Press. 
Thompson, Kathleen, and Hilary Mac Austin, eds. 2003. America s Children: 
 Picturing Childhoodfrom Early America to the Present. New York: Norton. 
Weber, Bruce. 1997. Branded Youth and Other Stories. Boston: Bulfinch/ 
 Little,Brown. 

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ILLUSTRATIONS 

Fig. 1. 1912 Playground 

Fig. 2. Teen boy with car and attitude 

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MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

Fig. 3. Boy in soap box derby car 

Fig. 4. Boys play with Legos 

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FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

Fig. 5. Sand castles at beach 

Fig. 6. Boy with erector set construction 

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MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

Fig. 7. Boy with tinker-toy airplane 

Fig. 8. Boys on raft 

t 

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FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

Fig. 9. Boys on Los Angeles playground, 1950s 

Fig. 10. Affectionate boys 

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MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

Fig. 11. playfighting with knives (album) 

Fig. 12. skinning dipping (album) 

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Fig. 13. Cub Scout minstrels 

Fig. 14. Boy Playing Indian 

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Fig. 15. Boys with guns 

Fig. 16. Fraternity hazing, 1941 

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