Caring for the Future: Brightside

I think about the act of shooting pictures as I walk the streets of Brightside, the eastern district of Sheffield, once an industrial heartland of foundries and steel works. I walk, stop, take my camera out, bring the viewfinder to my eye, compose, move a few paces to the left, the right, away, or closer to the target; I frame, focus, press the shutter, capture. Here is reality, here is truth (Figure 21.1). Susan Sontag (2005) suggests there is implicit violence in picture taking; an inescapable connotation in the metaphors we use to describe the photographic act: loading, aiming, and shooting. There is something of the hunter in every photographer, having traded rifles for cameras, perpetually roaming the plains of East Africa with “Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle [looking] through a viewfinder to frame a picture” (Sontag, 2005, p. 15).