April 17th, 2008
At the SHOT Show in February I met Kyle Cassidy, and checked out his recent book Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. It’s tough for me to critique photography in an artistic sense other than to say whether I like it or I don’t like it. In a nutshell, I like the photographs in this book.
The collection is a sometimes surprising cross section of gun owners in the United States, with a snippet about why they own guns. Seeing a wide range of regular (and a few not-quite-so regular) folks with their guns in their homes provides a lot of food for thought.
I conducted a quick email interview with Mr. Cassidy and his answers are both informative and thought provoking.
1. There is quite a wide range of gun owners portrayed in the book. Did you “try” to get a wide sample or did it just sort of turn out that way?
It mostly just turned out that way. I’ve come to suspect that the set of “gun owners” is a lot more diverse than most people think. We probably all have an idea of what a gun owner looks like. I found that there are people who are happy to identify themselves as owning a gun and there are people who don’t mention the fact that they do for one reason or another, maybe they don’t think it’s anybody’s business, or maybe they don’t shoot very much and it’s not a huge part of their lives…. So when you’re at a party and there’s a guy with an NRA hat on, you think “oh, that’s what gun owners look like” but there may be a dozen other people there who aren’t vocal about it and you don’t factor them into your idea of who gun owners are. I think I did a pretty good job at running into those other types of people because, for the most part, I wasn’t finding people at gun shows or places like that, where there might have been a bit more uniformity.
The way that I tried to diversify mostly was by changing my geography. Gun owners, and people in general, are different in Choudrant, Louisiana than they are in Seattle, Washington. And even from place to place in a state, gun owners in Philadelphia were different from gun owners in central PA. So, to some extent by saying “I’m going to spend X number of days in Wisconsin” I knew I was going to get people who represented the demographics of that area. There were some types of people I did actively court to greater or lesser degrees of success. I wanted someone who would represent the “I own a gun but I’m forbidden to have it with me” contingent, and I’d found a school teacher at a boarding school in New Jersey who kept his guns at his parents house because he wasn’t allowed to keep them on campus. I wanted to have him holding a photograph of his gun, but we just couldn’t work out timing. And I wanted someone who actually had a gun that local laws said they couldn’t have, because I think that’s an important part of the story. I offered to photograph anyone who wanted anonymously, but it’s a big leap of faith for someone to take. But apart from those I didn’t go out of my way to find particular types of people.
2. Did the gun owners write up the descriptions of the weapons?
For the most part though it was a bit of a hodge-podge. You’ll notice there are a couple times where the same gun isn’t listed the same way — I can’t think of an example off the top of my head, but there are a few, like one might say “Colt 1911″ and another might say “Colt .45″. Often people handed me a list of their guns that they’d written down, sometimes I’d write things down myself, and there were a couple of times where people just had no idea what kind of gun they had, so if it wasn’t something I was familiar with, I’d take a close-up of it and try and figure it out later.
Pretty much as soon as I had the manuscript in to the publisher the story broke on the Internet and we were getting bombarded by calls from the media, the people at Krause bumped it ahead in the production schedule to get it to press as soon as possible and the thing that suffered was conformity in gun identification. There aren’t many outright mistakes — the only one I can think of is a Lee Enfield that’s mis-identified as an M1, which is a big “ouch” but there were bound to be a few things that slipped by us.
3. With the exception of one which is difficult to make out, it appears that every person holding a gun has their finger clearly off the trigger. Was this always on their own? Or did you request it? If you requested it, was it for simple safety, or was it specifically for what you wanted in the book?
I decided right at the beginning that it wasn’t my job to be a range safety officer and as long as I was sure that I wasn’t going to get shot, or my assistant wasn’t going to get shot, it wasn’t my job to tell people to look responsible. I wanted to tell their stories and if that involved poor gun handling, that was part of the story. It just turned out that by and large, most people were careful, I got swept a couple of times but that’s probably par for the course when dealing with such a broad range of gun owners with varying degrees of familiarity with their guns. Some people were militant about safety, they opened chambers and showed me each gun was empty, and there were other people who weren’t as through.
4. Did you run into many situations where other members of the gun-owner’s family didn’t necessarily agree with the decision to own guns or appear in the book?
It wasn’t uncommon to find a household that was “mixed” in that one person liked guns and the other person didn’t. But I think if I was going around photographing football fans or knitters I would have met plenty of spouses who said “I cannot stand my spouses hobby or the people that s/he votes for.” So, while it wasn’t unusual, I don’t think it was odd.
There was one person whose father thought I was working for Osama Bin Laden. He, very seriously, kept telephoning his kid saying “This guy is just making a map of who has guns and where they are, he’s probing the country for weak spots, don’t let him take your picture!” But that was one person out of all of the relatives of the two hundred or so who are in the book. Mostly it was guys who said “My wife says I can do it if I clean the house first.”
5. This book seems to something that could be used by both “sides” of the gun control debate. What sort of feedback have you received from those who support gun ownership?
That’s a good question. Going into this I thought I was going to take a real beating from both “sides” but that hasn’t happened. Gun owners have been very positive about it. One of the first reviews that came out was by David Petzel from _Field and Stream_ who called it “a fair picture of who owns guns”, which was the best thing I could have hoped anybody could say. All I ever wanted was to be fair — I didn’t want to make pro-gun propaganda, or anti-gun propaganda, I wanted to present a fair portrait, to be as honest as I could about it. After that, Guns and Ammo gave it a really great review and just kept plugging it on their web site, Shotgun News gave it a great review. But I think the best feedback I’ve gotten has been from the people who have written to say “I showed your book to my mom/dad/wife and for the first time we were able to have a conversation about this thing that we don’t agree on that’s very important to me.” Those are the ones that have the most meaning to me.
5a. How about feedback from those in favor of stricter gun control?
That’s been really good too for the most part. Almost nobody’s criticized the photography, which is nice. The reviews fall into two camps right off the bat, one of which is an instantly dismissive “these people all look like fools,” which I think comes from people who haven’t read the book and are maybe reacting to a single image someone’s posted, because not everybody in the book is really even _pro gun_, so you can’t honestly lump them all together. There are also at least two police officers in there photographed with their duty weapons whom I think even strident gun control activists would agree are legitimate gun owners, so I take those reviews with a grain of salt. Then there are some very thoughtful reviews which seem split between “I think guns are dangerous and I can’t stop looking at these photographs” and a lot of “I had no idea that people like this would own guns, some of them seem so normal.” I’ve been really lucky to have seen so many on-line discussions about the book and I’m really amazed at how long a lot of them are able to remain civil — they do mostly all end up with two or three people shouting bumper sticker slogans back and forth, but I think along the way before everything crumbles, there are a lot of people who are able to have legitimate conversations and share thoughts.
6. Did the subjects pick their setting, or did you?
Sometimes me, sometimes them. For most people I did between two and five different setups. A few people had their guns set up before I got there and when they did I always photographed them that way first, and then I looked around to see if there was something I liked better. I wanted the photos to all be visually appealing, good photographs, so that was paramount in my mind. Afterwards there was a lengthy editing process that might start with ten photos that were contenders and got weeded down to the final one. 80% of the time or more the final shot was my choice — most people didn’t suggest one.
7. I’ve got to ask. Is there a story with all those pizza boxes in the corner on page 61?
That’s a good question too. When I was going to take that photograph I said “let me just move those pizza boxes out of the way” and my girlfriend, who was with me at the time, said “What? Are you crazy?” and she was right. They do really help make that photo. I did ask Dan what the deal was with all the pizza boxes and he said: “I miss recycling day a lot.” So that’s it. He orders out a lot and isn’t always around on recycling day.
8. A few people are holding their weapons left-handed. Do you know if they shoot left-handed? Or was it for aesthetic purposes?
I actually don’t know.
9. Lots of pets. Was that intentional, did people make a point to include their pet, or did it just turn out that way?
I didn’t want this book to rely on the crutch of controversy to be interesting. I didn’t want to be like “HEY! LOOK! HERE’S A GUN!” People are made up of countless facets — you’re a gun owner, but you’re also a father, a football fan, a construction worker, a golfer — all those other things. I wanted to capture as many of those as possible and, hopefully, not create a one dimensional depiction of people. If you bring an animal into your home, you’re making a multi-year commitment — sometimes ten or twenty years — to take care of something whose very life depends on you. That says something to me about someone’s character. I thought if someone came to my house and said “Hey, I’d like to take a family portrait of you in your house” I’d want my pets in it, so it just seemed logical.
10. Were any of the families with kids who shoot hesitant to include their children in the photo?
Yes. There was one family whose kids didn’t know their parents had guns, I had to photograph them after the kids went to bed. Apart from that there were a couple of significant others who didn’t want to be in the photograph for whatever reason. I always offered, but I didn’t ask why if they said no.
11. Did any of the gun owners “grill” you on whether or not your book was going to be used to cast gun ownership in a bad light?
Absolutely. It was extraordinarily difficult at first because I told everybody “I’m not making a pro-gun book, but I’m not making an anti-gun book either,” — which is an awful lot to wrap your head and your trust around for somebody you don’t know — yet another “objective journalist”, so to speak. When it was just me saying that most people were either very suspicious, or plain old not interested in participating. Once I had a few photographs though, I would show them to people and say “this is what I’m doing” and they could look at it and instantly see exactly what I was up to. It got much easier after that. One couple early on had me come to their house twice for what amounted to an extended interview, they wanted to feel me out and make sure I wasn’t there to pass judgement or present them in a slanted light — they made it clear that if I was legitimate they were very interested, because they wanted people to know why these things were important to them, but if I wasn’t, I couldn’t get out of town fast enough. They had me come over twice and eventually they took a chance. And three years later, we still talk.
12. Did meeting all these folks and spending a bit of time with them have any effect on the way you personally view gun ownership in America?
Very much so. I came to this from outside the gun culture so I really only had vague ideas; I live in a big city where I thought most of my neighbors didn’t own guns and really the exposure I had to guns was the evening news. I realized that there were competition shooters, hunters, people who lived in scary, remote areas, things like that, but I really underestimated the number of different reasons that people owned guns for and that they were really all over the spectrum. I met gun owners who are pacifists, I met gun owners who are vegetarians … a lot of my stereotypes were thrown out the window.
It’s made me, more than anything else, realize that the issue of gun ownership in America is a lot more complicated than I’d ever thought before, it’s not black and white, it’s a vast field of grey, and it doesn’t really fit on a bumper sticker. I realize now that in order for the issue to come anywhere closer to a resolution people need to be able to do two things: they need to be able to listen, and they need to be able to realize that they might not be right about everything.
What’s your current/next project?
I’m photographing veterans tattoos and finding out the stories behind them. I’m finding it really fascinating and it keeps me out meeting people, which is where I want to be. I’ve also been doing a lot of landscapes in the Mojave desert lately. I’d never been to the desert before the Armed America trips and seeing the country really just made me so excited about the landscape.
Again, the book is definitely worth a look and will probably be appreciated by those interested in guns, gun owners, and fine photography. Or all of the above.
Also, check out Kyle’s Livejournal for loads of good and fun photos and his Amazon blog for more info on the book. Additional photos and info are available at the book’s official site.
Finally, I just downloaded Empty Places: At the Fringes of the Mojave Desert. Good stuff.
I thank Kyle for taking the time to answer my questions.
