It should be stressed that the "camera" invoked here is a metaphor, not a comment on the actual process of photography, which is often not passive recording of an unchanged external world. See, for example, Dyer's (1997) elegant discussion of the process of "making white people white" for the purposes of film, or consider the question of the impact of photographic images of thin models on the propensity to diet (and thus to alter one's own body) or even to suffer eating disorders.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 1395