Shoot to Build

The Camera as a Tool for Construction.

A space crossed repeatedly, where practice is built through movement and time.

I’ve been hearing the same line since I started in photography more than two decades ago: “the camera is a weapon.” Everyone repeated it with a suspicious ease, but nobody bothered to explain it (or at least it took me a long time and a lot of reflection to understand it).

It was one of those phrases that sound deep and get repeated without much thought.

A weapon, for me, was always something that wounds, cuts, destroys. A tool designed to cause damage. A weapon transforms a body, a situation, or a space… but through violence.The camera didn’t fit into that category. How could a camera an object that doesn’t even hurt to touch be a weapon?

Years passed, along with many projects, conversations, and photographs that left a mark on me, until I finally understood that the phrase wasn’t about violence. It was about responsibility.

"The camera is not a weapon of destruction. It’s a weapon of construction."

It builds culture. It builds memory. It builds ways of seeing. It builds critical thinking in the person holding it.

Nan Goldin,understood this in a visceral way: her camera was a tool to confront entire systems, to document what many didn’t want to look at directly. She didn’t photograph with distance; she photographed with presence, with her body, with her life. There is a weapon there, yes, but it’s a weapon that builds empathy, opens conversations, and provokes discomfort when it needs to.

Jack Latham, takes it in another direction. In Sugar Paper Theories, he uses photography, archives, and staging to dismantle certainties. His work forces you to question yourself and the system. That questioning is a form of construction: it rearranges the pieces of a story that seemed closed. That is also a kind of firing.

Erik Kessels, on the other hand, works through accumulation, found archives, errors, the discarded. By reorganizing all of that, he builds new ways of understanding photography. He shows you that even a failed image has power. The weapon isn’t in perfect aesthetics, but in the ability to make you look twice.

And we could keep naming others: Jon Cazenave, Susan Meiselas, Cristina de Middel… each of them understands, in their own way, that the camera is never an innocent object. It never was.

It took me a while to understand this because I always heard the word “weapon” literally.But with time I realized the camera doesn’t destroy bodies; it destroys illusions. It doesn’t kill people; it kills comfortable ideas. It doesn’t cut flesh; It cuts utopias.

And at the same time, it builds the opposite:It builds bridges, narratives, doubts, questions, contradictions.

I also realized something important: photography changes the people who look at it, but it changes even more the person who makes it. You can spend twenty years taking pictures and still be surprised by what you see when you lower the camera. That constant collision is one of the things that builds the most.

For a long time I thought photography was simply about “showing what’s there.”Over the years I learned that photography is about showing why what’s there matters. And that’s the real weapon. Not the single image, but the insistence, the repetition, the questions it leaves behind.

The camera doesn’t fire bullets;it fires decisions and every decision leaves a mark.

That’s why I call it a tool for construction because every shot lays a brick in our collective memory. Another brick in how we understand a community, a country, a conflict, an identity even an emotion.

And this isn’t cheap romanticism. It’s not a metaphor to sound clever in a lecture. It’s the reality of the craft.

Documentary, conceptual, artistic photography… the label doesn’t matter. They all come with a built-in responsibility: if you look, you’re already part of the story. And if you choose to photograph it, you’re building something that others will have to face.

That’s why I think that the camera is not neutral. It never was neither is the photographer.

And if we accept that what we do has consequences, then let those consequences mean something. Let them build conversation, awareness, memory, doubt. Whatever it is but let it be intentional.

If you are going to shoot, then shoot to build because if you are not building anything, then yes, the camera becomes an empty weapon and there’s nothing more dangerous than a weapon with no purpose.