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The Gun and the Camera: Perspectives on the Genders of Mechanical Violence
The gun may be instructively posed as the masculine polarity of the camera. In the firearm, we witness the technological rendering of the concept whose origins lie in the projected stone, the spear and the bow and arrow. Before we became hyper-representational, our relationships with such objects were richly oriented in a context in which they were known and felt as expressions of fundamental principles related to birth, origin, life, and death.
The gun has few if any of these ‘associations’; it is a ‘pure’ mechanized derivative whose nature is implicitly ‘a function’ — and the function is killing. The gun emits a projectile which deprives a target of health, wholeness, vitality, or existence as a living being. It turns a living being into an object. This is the opposite of the penis, which ejects semen with the capacity to fertilize an egg and potentiate life.
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The camera (with which we also ‘shoot’ subjects or targets) receives light, producing a product in which dimensionality is flattened to a plane and the living flow of time is frozen. Effectively: dead time, coupled with static identity. We find in the photograph the…
