Shoot! Existential Photography
12.10.2012
Shoot! Existential Photography opens today at the Photographer’s Gallery. By exploring the shared vocabulary and various analogies between the gun and the camera, the show charts the history of the photographic shooting gallery, an early twentieth century fairground attraction that has fascinated artists ever since. If fairgoers hit the target, they would in turn be shot by a camera, winning a snapshot of themselves caught in the act of shooting. The exhibition pivots on the metaphorical implications of this bizarre confrontation between photography and shooting.
For curator Clément Chéroux the essence of this phenomenon is easily grasped: “The symbolic meaning of this specific way of shooting oneself is immediately apparent…the mortal duel engenders an image. Looking at his portrait afterward, the shooter sees he trained his gun on himself. The whole attraction plays with the thrill of being one’s own executioner; a quick peep into the vertigo of self destruction”.
Following the legacy of Niki de Saint Phalle, both Rudolf Steiner and Jean-François Lecourt make the camera their target, letting the bullet hole serve as the aperture for the camera, and creating an image on impact that records the photographic process as well as the bullet’s path. Steiner and Lecourt turn the language of photography back on itself, loading, aiming and shooting, and reversing the power play between subject and observer. Lecourt’s most violent experiments have actually destroyed the camera completely.
The exhibition also includes Christian Marclay’s video-sound installation, Crossfire, a montage of film samplings that brings together scenes with actors taking aim at the audience. Shown on four screens surrounding viewers, the installation catches us in a flickering, deafening audio and visual crossfire from all sides.
At the end of the exhibition, visitors have a chance to experience the photographic shooting gallery for themselves in a reconstruction courtesy of Martin Becka and Maximilien Roy.
Shoot! Existential Photography is showing 12 October 2012 – 6 January 2013 at the Photographer’s Gallery, 16 – 18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW.
Things to see, Photography.
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