We Love This Fucking Project

By David Topping

Finn O’Hara grew up in Inglewood, “the middle of rural Ontario” as he puts it, with a name “as Irish as it gets”—Finn Donal Douglas O’Hara—in a sea of Daves and Jeffs. He wanted to be a hockey player (his name would’ve looked cool on a jersey), but ended up as a professional photographer instead. Just as well: after a revelatory moment in the shower a week ago, O’Hara has created I Love Your Fucking Name, a project devoted to collecting and photographing the human specimens attached to the most “magnificent,” “brawny,” “awesome,” “unusual,” and “offthefuckingwall!” names.
The project is as much about each person’s name as “the story behind it,” O’Hara told Torontoist—the turmoil and teasing that necessarily accompany some of the names, but also everyone’s endurance of them. In a way, says O’Hara, having an unusual name is “like being born with half an arm”: once you get used to it, “it’s pretty fucking easy.” The project is starting off here in Toronto, but word of it has already spread. It will grow to be “as big as it wants to be,” says O’Hara, to the point where he hopes that over the next year or so he can visit people with interesting names worldwide—like the Harry Beaver who lives in Virginia who’s already submitted his name—when he’s in their neck of the woods. As it is being shot, the project will be slowly unveiled to the Fucking website, with a gallery show and book potentially on their way after all the shooting is done.
If you’ve got a particularly attention-worthy name, you can sign up yourself, and, should your name attain what O’Hara labels “the seal of awesomeness,” you’ll get $50, fame, and a print of your photo. And no cheaters; you’ll be photographed with ID.
Photo courtesy of Finn O’Hara. Tip via MyHogtown.