2027 SPE Annual Conference: Community in Contrast
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print this pageFocus. Aim. Trigger. Shoot.
Friday, October 23 - 12:00PM to 12:45PM
WCAD 101
In one of the earliest photos I have of myself, my grandfather cradles me to his chest with one hand, and in the other, he holds several boxes of ammunition. This photo of us was sent to Sierra Bullets, an American ammunition company, along with a letter explaining that my family chose to name me after this business.
When I came to photography, I already knew the vocabulary. I grew up knowing two kinds of shooting, and it would take me decades to question why they shared language at all.
To say that my childhood is entangled with American gun culture is an understatement. It is the river that runs through my relationship with my paternal family. When my father died, he left too many things to sort through. So I only took what I knew, the photos and the guns. One of the objects was a Sierra Bullets Reloading Manual. It sat on my desk for three months before I opened it and realized how similar it looked to my own photography manuals. The diagrams, the language, the logic of control—it was built in the whole time. Focus. Aim. Trigger. Shoot.
The manuals were only part of what I inherited. Using collage, I bring my family archive into conversation with two technical archives, photography manuals and shooting manuals. My personal archive is full of small contradictions: men cradling babies and bullets. The technical manuals share more than they should. Collage let me take those paradoxes apart and rebuild them in my own terms, allowing me to trace the personal and public overlap of guns, power, and paternity.
This talk will give a tour of these topics:
My artistic collage process with different archives.
How shared language shaped my idea of power and Photography.
Using personal and institutional archives to examine larger cultural concepts.
What guns and photography both teach us about power and who holds it.
speaker
Sierra Greenslade
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