Nan Goldin who has gone out to hunt images like no other represents an extreme case of stripping of intimacy. With the complicity of her subjects, she removes all physical, phychic and social veils and screens that cover them to show them in their nudity
without poses or devices of any kind. She also shows that the life of persons marginalized by society: transvestites, drug addicts, unemployed, etc are apt preys to photographical hunting, that it is not necessary to aim at models hired at an agency to obtain successful images.

Shooting to get a photo of oneself in the act of shooting on a stand at the fair can be a metaphor of suicide, but it is above all what the shooter looks for; homage to his power, ability to kill with a gun, registered at the moment he symbolically executes that power.

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While it is a desire related to death it is paradoxically a register of the desire of immortality. It is a peculiar form of self portrait, very different from those of Cindy Sherman or Robert Mapplethorpe or even Annie Leibovitz, but similar for the desire to outlive the moment of the shooting.

For another part replacing the shotgun with a camera, as the hunter turned into photographer does, is to grant that same immortality to the prey, it is to acknowledge its dignity without renouncing a fight with it from which the photographer-hunter comes out victorious when he obtains the image he wants of his prey, nervous
and distrustful, a prey that will not give in to anything, much less to posing. If the hunter is skilful he gets hold of the soul of the

animal… or at least part of it.

For a long time, in some cultures and in ours more recently, we protect out image, that for many is the same as their soul, creating police barriers as well as legal consequences with monetary fines when someone tries to capture it without our consent. This creates the paradox that those who have cried out most to establish those barriers are precisely those who have made a public affair of their private life, transmitting all of us with their concern to preserve our image. The photographers-hunters have it hard now that so many resist to be captured.