I have always had trouble naming my own stuff. There’s a tendency to think up new and interesting names, but what makes you pick one that sticks? And that means something? And that fits? And the fact that this is 2016, and any name you think is funny and clever is probably taken everywhere about a hundred times over?
That’s the dilemma I faced trying to “name” my Flickr, and consequently my doll photography as a whole. And that’s why for so long it has basically not had a name. I got into it as an experiment and didn’t know I was going to be around for the long haul. You’d think I would have tried at the start for something memorable, but really I picked an old standby from a domain I had as a kid (don’t look it up, seriously. It’s lame).
But problematically, if I meet someone in person, I have no nice Flickr handle I can hand out to be like, yes I’m weird, I photograph dolls but I take it really seriously, look at my stuff. Even my trash photography has a nice name! My Flickr url is flickr.com/q37598q3798meaninglesslettersandnumbersformiles. That’s my clever way of disguising the fact that I don’t even know and couldn’t tell you. It’s a problem.
Anyway, let’s talk dolls for a moment. I love vintage Sindy dolls. Unfortunately I don’t live in the UK, so getting them takes a bit more time and money than I’d like, but it hasn’t stopped me from perusing everywhere online to tried to find more information about them and grow my tiny collection. Right now I’ve got two brunettes, a blond, and a redhead, and I’m trying to figure out my favorite way to rebody them because I always want articulated limbs, plus the sticky plastic legs of the older dolls combined with the musty smells they’ve often picked up makes me think touching them is going to give me cancer or something. They’re kind of a hassle, but I really love them–and why?
My attraction to a particular doll (and I realize this is probably more than evident by what I do, but I realize I’ve never articulated it before) is usually because I look at the face and sense a thought or an emotion. I don’t like blankness, and to be honest most smiling dolls, at least most commercially produced smiling dolls, look completely empty to me. And often the faces that look the least empty to me are either vaguely sad or angry. A sideglance also works wonders. Blythe, Monster High, Ever After High, Poppy Parker, Dynamite Girls, etcetera. If the collection has a brooding girl, I’m sucked in. So when I came across Sindys that had such a distinct look that they were even called “sad eyed” Sindys, I was totally sold. I promptly got my hands on two of them. Using the search term “sad eyed Sindy” seemed to help me find more of these Pedigree girls.
And one day it hit me that “sad eyed doll” wasn’t just a search term, it was a name. A perfect name! A name that describes what I do, why some of my work comes out the way it does! It was too perfect. It had to be claimed. And it wasn’t! And least not in a way that I could find, and most importantly, not as a domain. Because I wanted this name to be all-encompassing.
After the discovery that my perfect name was just sitting out there in the ether waiting to be plucked, I then had to hassle with spelling. Did it need a dash? Did it need a dash in the domain name? Picky details, but it prolonged my efforts. But fortunately, while I was dragging my feet something happened that helped to reaffirm that “sad eyed doll” was without a doubt what I wanted to be calling my work. Mattel announced they were relaunching Monster High (and slowly transforming Ever After High under the table) into “happier” and “sweeter” (and cheaper) doll lines with disgustingly childish revamped branding, including more pink, more fluff, and smiling head molds. Not gonna lie, I was bummed for weeks. I love being able to go to the store and just buy a damn doll, no waiting, no shipping costs, no hoping that the face-up looks as good in person.
But considering that this change is so contrary to the things that make me a doll collector and a doll photographer, it has made me embrace the name “sad eyed doll” as an embodiment of identity. Happiness sells because it’s easy… but life isn’t always easy. And life isn’t always happy. And that’s okay. Pretending depressing things don’t exist doesn’t just magically make them go away. So, Mattel, if it’s more commercially successful for you to make Apple White into Miss Mary Sunshine, great, but I’m not following suit.
Anyway. Setting up a website to showcase my work and my thoughts dolls has been an entirely different story, one I definitely can’t get into here. But after getting this place set up, I had one more final naming task to do: converting my Flickr. And changing your handle on Flickr is a weird thing because you can do it anytime, but from what I can gather it sends notifications to all of your contacts that you are newly following them? Because your handle is new? It’s strange and I wanted to do it only once, and carefully. Preferably with an accompanying photo. And it’s not like I don’t have tons upon tons of photos that would have been perfectly appropriate, but I’d always rather do something new than rework something old.
So when I decided I wanted to do a photo for Melanie Martinez’s song “Cry Baby”, I figured this could also be the shoot where I finally communicated the new name. Because the story of Melanie’s whole album of the same name, Cry Baby, is even something like the story of sad eyed doll. What people perceive as flaws–being too emotional, talking about taboo things like depression–these things can be turned into a strength if we embrace them as a part of who we are and talk about them honestly. Instead of just shoving them away.
So here it is. Sad eyed doll. Because sometimes things aren’t perfect, but that’s okay. We get through them with art.
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