"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time." - Susan Sontag, On Photography.
She acknowledges the way in which a camera can be used to objectify the subject of a photograph, causing the metaphorical 'shooter' to have a certain knowledge of the subject that they can never fully understand. I fully agree with this argument, and think that as a budding photographer, I can understand how having a photograph of someone, whether it portrays them in a negative or positive way can give the photographer a certain sense of 'control' over the subject. It's an aspect of power that is not usually articulated, yet is subconsciously acknowledged constantly.
She also refers to how using a camera can be a 'subliminal murder', the word murder of course linking back to the similarities between the camera and the gun. She goes on to speak about how taking a photograph of someone is a type of murder, knowing that everyone's life will eventually end, and accepting that eventually the subject of a photograph will die, and the photograph will live on like a spiritual memory of that person or people.
We then looked at the Shooting Gallery Exhibition, a photographic exhibition focusing on guns used in images and the messages they portray. We were given the photographer Agnès Geoffray and her photograph 'The Female Shooter' (2005). Here is the image:
After studying this image there are a lot of messages that come through it that makes it unique to the rest of the images displayed in that exhibition, in particular the use of a female subject and the direction of which the gun is pointing, towards her instead of away.
The subject is looking down the barrel of the gun instead of down the sights, making her the hypothetical victim of the shot, possibly linking back to the idea that the subject of a photograph is also the victim. Also the viewer is looking down the gun linking again to the idea that the 'shooter' of the camera is also the shooter of the metaphorical gun.
The use of a woman as the subject is particularly interesting because through history women have always been viewed as inferior to men, men being the dominant gender. This image shows this very clearly, but what makes it even more interesting is that the photographer is a woman herself, which therefore leads me to two conclusions, 1 that she was acknowledging that women are supposedly inferior to males, or the more likely, 2 that she was trying to make the viewer see this blatant stereotype through the use of this shocking image, making the him or her question what is really going on.
"Agnès Geoffray (F) is an artist living and working in Bruxelles (B). She currently works with photographs, writings and printings."
'The Female Shooter' looks to have been taken on black and white 35mm film, and is a one off image, not a part of a series or theme. As stated earlier in this blog post, I believe that this photograph's historical context might be the feminist movement, it appears to be older than it is because of the grainy quality of the 35mm film, possibly trying to make it look like it fit in with the time of the movement.
After doing some deeper research on the photographer, I found out that from her past she has always been interested in the connections between art and mortality. Her mother, father and brother all sadly died when they went to an art exhibition when she was younger, and she wrote that 'I lost my parents because of art.'
It got to the stage where she actually 'rented' out a fictional family to come and live with her, getting them to dress and act like her family she lost. She lived with these people for such a long time she actually came to hypothetically 'adopt' them as her real family. It is because of this devastating loss of her family that photographer Agnes Geoffray has such a 'complecated' relationship with art, saying on her website "And eventually, what I hated the most : art, which took my parents away from me, gave me something else since now I use photography in my work. "
Knowing this information now makes her work all the more interesting, I can appreciate her as a person as well as a photographer and understand in depth the complexity behind her images.
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