Product Description
Appearing as an attraction at fairgrounds in the years after World War I, the photo shooting gallery was a bizarre sideshow. A camera would respond when the bullet hit the centre of the target by taking a picture of the person shooting. Instead of winning prizes like a bag of chocolates, a toy balloon or a stuffed teddy bear, the successful shooter was awarded a portrait of himself/herself shooting. The symbolic meaning of this specific way of ‘shooting’ a photo of oneself is immediately apparent: combining photography and shooting, the setup is hinged on twin actions that even have common terms such as to shoot, to aim, to load, etc. However, this mortal duel engenders an image. Looking at his portrait after shooting, the shooter sees that he trained his gun on himself and ultimately fired the shot at himself. The inventors of the photo shooting gallery most probably speculated on the visitor’s urge to go on a strange ego trip through intermediary images. The whole attraction plays with the temptation to fight a duel with oneself, with the thrill of being one’s own executioner – for the sake of a quick peep into the vertigo of self-destruction. Various portraits of Jean-Paul Sartre taken at fairground photo shooting galleries suggest that the author of Being and Nothingness was inclined to indulge in such a leisure activity. It is not gratuitous that this device provides the remarkable opportunity of creating a photographic representation of oneself whilst, at the same time, symbolically eliminating oneself. Shoot! Existential photography traces back the history of this amazing process – from its more popular form as a shooting gallery at Luna Parks to its reappropriation and respective use by various artists.
