Shooting Shots

You’re looking through your camera, you see an image you’ve seen before (an image from the past): shoot. Beudelaire was right: “Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers”

Copiers, I’m thinking of erasers. The Erasers (1951) was Alain Robbe-Grillet’s debut novel - a detective story with a postmodern twist. As Ted Gioia states: “In the convoluted world of Robbe-Grillet, the same crime might even take place twice, in the identical location and with even the same victim. To reinforce this sense of doubleness, the author will sometimes repeat specific passages of dialogue or description.”

The book is nothing more than an account of the twenty-four hours that ensue between the pistol shot and the death, the time the bullet takes to travel three or four yards – twenty four hours.

Twenty-six years separate my ‘shooting shots’.