For the last five years, Odette England has been collecting vernacular photographs of men taking pictures of women without permission, women rejecting the camera by placing their hands over their faces, men posing with guns, and images of posed or gesturing hands. Viewed as a body of work, the images propose disturbing links between shooting a photograph, shooting a gun, and violence against women. Both guns and cameras are loaded, aimed and shot; the quotidian term “snapshot”, used to describe many types of vernacular image, is derived from hunting terminology. For England, these images bring to the surface the problematic visual habits embedded in our culture and draw attention to the ways in which the camera is often used as a weapon against women and girls. This can be literally, for example voyeurism, revenge porn and upskirting, but also structurally, as in the ways that the media and advertising industries use photographic imagery to perpetuate and normalise misogyny, racism, body dysmorphia and violence.

“When we speak of ‘shooting’ with a camera, we are acknowledging the kinship of photography and violence,” writes the author and photographer Teju Cole. Cole identifies the camera (along with the gun and the Bible) as a key component of the colonial toolkit, integral in documenting, categorising and asserting dominance over the colonised. Conscious of this power dynamic between the photographer and the photographed, England seeks to reclaim some agency for the antagonised female subjects of her image collection. The rejection embodied in their outstretched hands can be read as a conceptual act: the refusal to become an image or even to be present, in a world where the commodification and marketisation of the self has come to dominate contemporary culture.