Photo Sniper
Gun Stock Camera Mounts 2016 – ongoing
Sarah Pickering’s Photo Sniper is a collection of readymades; camera steady devices adapted from gun stock camera mounts for shooting photographs with a long lens. When used with a 35mm SLR camera the cable release can be fired where the gun trigger would have been. This analogue and outdated technology is a relic of an era where the practicality of the device was embraced. Each piece of the growing archive that has been collected by Pickering is displayed as a sculpture without the camera or the gun barrel. The void or absence embodied by each gun stock alludes to the bullet, the film and the imagined target or image captured by the hunter. The language of shooting and its relationship to photography is articulated in these works where the equivalence between shooting and violence is at once sinister, playful and powerless. Viewers walking amongst the installation will find themselves aiming and being aimed at by impotent objects with drooping cable releases. As a feminist response to largely masculine pursuits of amateur photography (particularly the enthusiasm around kit) and shooting and even warmongering, this work offers a critique to the imbalance of power within these systems.