Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Mon, 12 Apr 1999 15:01:55 -0400 (EDT)
Feeling the hot breath of the list minders at my back, I continue this
thread with the rationale that we are all of us, straight, crooked, or
"alternative" as may be, subject to the dictates of contemporary usage.
I'm relieved to find defense of "shooting," for which mercy the
linguistically unreconstructed must give all thanks, but the subject
piqued me enough to check my bedside dictionary this AM.
If it had proved otherwise you might not be reading this report, but as I
suspected my 1934 Webster's Collegiate has 9 meanings for the noun
"shoot," of which only 4 relate to weapons, and that not until #3. The
first 2 are "send forth" and "push forward" or "protrude." Examples given
were such as "shoot the rapids," "tender shoots of spring" and "silk shot
with silver" (meaning to variegate). Other meanings were to spring up or
to grow rapidly.
Under the verb form were "shooting star," "shooting pain" and "shooting
iron. "
My thought is that if the gun owners object to these connotations of life,
let them find another term, like "I'll take a forceful aim at it."
What we would do with the term "snap conjurer" I'm not certain of,,, but
the other term that comes to mind is, "oh, shoot."
On Mon, 12 Apr 1999, Carl Weese wrote:
>
> Agree completely on the nudes, Coplan, and how the word means, or should
> mean people without clothes, either gender.
Well, let me add a slightly more nuanced (or should I say "alternative"?)
view of the Coplans, which are, to put it mildly NOT my favorite
photographs. Very few people seem to know that a similar treatment was
done of her own body by Nina Howell Starr, sometime in the 1970s, which
apparently vanished without a trace. The thought does come to mind, for
which I hope to be forgiven, that to "make it" with an against-the-grain
theme of that sort, it helps to be ..... a man. Or should I also say a man
with 24 carat connections in the art world? (For those who may not
know, Coplans had been, among many other roles, publisher of Artforum when
it was the alpha and omega of avant art, during the 1970s.)
As for waiting for *the* something moment, Carl, I do it too, but am very
ambivalent about the concept. Some things should just *be.* But I got my
comeuppance the other day, actually came back to the house for the camera,
because the magnolia tree over the dumpster was *almost* ready to burst
into bloom. By the time I got back 2 minutes later the sun had come out,
the "shot" was ruined... Next day it teemed, and the day after... every
bud on the tree was in riotous bloom.... big bore.
Judy
> As for "shoot" it doesn't bother me either, Judy. Maybe because both
> marksmanship and photography were part of my childhood and the term is
> deeply ingrained for both. But it *is* deeply ingrained in photography.
> For a nice bit of trivia the term "snapshot" is actually borrowed from
> marksmanship: the term was first used to describe the technique of bird
> hunting with a shotgun, and then of course its target equivalent called
> skeet, where the marksman shoots without using sights, by practiced
> instinct. Now I've never shot at birds with a shotgun (I don't even eat
> meat) but the chain of physical discipline underlies handheld camera
> work quite clearly. And mentally, I "shoot" with a 12x20 camera too: I
> often set up because I see 90% of a picture, and wait for something
> unexpected to happen. When something does I set off the shutter. That
> may be a little more like pulling the lanyard on a howitzer than
> shooting a bird, but the vital part of photographic vision that concerns
> capturing a specific moment in time seems well described by the term
> 'shoot'.
>
> ---Carl
>
>
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