Should we stop using shoot to talk about photography?

Sometimes, certain words just don’t feel right.

Around a year ago, I was writing an email to the principal of a school my firm had designed, which had recently been completed. My email began something like this:

Hi [Principal],

I am reaching out to discuss when we might be able to come and shoot your school.

I stared long and hard at one of the words above. You know which one. I tap-tap-tapped the BACKSPACE key and tried some alternatives. Shoot photography of your school? Conduct a photo shoot of your school? But no matter how I rewrote the sentence, using shoot left me feeling uneasy. Eventually, I think I settled on take some photos of your school, a reasonable enough substitution.

In fact, this negative association between shoot and schools is powerful enough that following my tortuous session of email-writing above, I resolved to stop using shoot at all when talking about architectural photography of our schools.

Despite this cautious self-editing when it came to schools, the default language I use to talk about photography remained intact: you set up shoots in order to shoot things.

The recent spate of gun violence, though, has prompted me to wonder whether I should drop shoot from my photography vocabulary entirely. Workplaces and retail locations—other subjects of architectural photography—are no less likely to be the location for gun violence, so why not take the follow the precedent I’d already set for myself with schools?

Thinking beyond architectural photography, I began to wonder about another candidate term to consider dropping: headshot, frequently used when discussing portrait photography. The popularity of the term, as used in first-person shooter video games, makes me question whether its use in talking in photography is likewise unhelpful.

Now, dropping shoot from my architectural vocabulary is a personal choice, not one I would expect or demand from others. I offer the above as just a suggestion of how we might soften our language a little bit, and hopefully avoid raising the hackles of our listeners or readers.