Shot in the Dark

 "There is no war without photography, that notable aesthete of war Ernst Jünger observed in 1930, thereby refining the irrepressible identification of the camera and the gun, 'shooting' a subject and shooting a human being.  War-making and picture-taking are congruent activities: 'It is the same intelligence, whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemy to the exact second and meter,' wrote Jünger, 'that labors to preserve the great historical event in fine detail.'"


   ~ Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others - 66-67

 I have always referred to "shooting" when referencing my work, or potential work, with anyone.  No one ever explained to me where the term came from.  I don't really remember anyone in my creative life ever using that word that way.  To be perfectly honest, in hearing a captured frame referenced to as a "shot," it only made sense to me, literarily, that the process be called shooting, and I imagined that I thought that up on my own, though I never pretended that I was the first to use the word as a creative verb.


In a recent attempt to continue my inspirational reading journey, I fumbled across the quoted book, by an author I've been told to read, but hadn't.  I have even had her books sent to me, a la .pdf, which are currently sitting on my desktop, and I will probably never read them, because I need to actually hold a book in my hand.

In my search for actual books, Regarding the Pain of Others seemed to really hit home in my current life.  While it was incredibly informative, basically just reinforcing my personal views of war photography and war, it was all about war and incredibly depressing.  I was expecting something a little bit more about general pain in regard to being human, not humans being massacred, but I did learn this interesting little fact about where "shooting," or even "a shot," came from, which is also very depressing.

In my life, I have suffered a number of people wanting to shoot in the snow; I don't know what other word to use; but rational thought process always prevailed: if it's snowing, it's fucking cold.  If you're going to shoot in the snow, you naturally want to do it when it's not really cold enough to stick or stack (35-37).  We tried today, on a road we probably shouldn't have been driving on.  It didn't last too long (because cold and cold naked are two entirely different things), but we got some decent stuff.  It also stopped really coming down when we started shooting, so we got what the fates allowed.  C'est la vie.