A
hip-shot turkey, like all animals, is often dead meat.
But if meaning comes, as Sontag suggests, from the "odd angle" or "the poetry of the turned back," Ai's oblique,
hip-shot approach to his subjects carries with it a push-back, both pictorial and attitudinal, to any sense of the staging of social order.
Jack Hawkins--retired Navy sharpshooter, laconic southern gentleman and one-half of the gunsmithing staff of Dixie Shooter's Supply--stood sweat-drenched in the Carolina sun and eyeballed yet another
hip-shot silhouette.
Another trotted in from a favorable angle, so close I could almost have
hip-shot him, except that with my baggy camo gloves I couldn't push off the safety of the unfamiliar rifle.