There have now been more mass shootings in 2023 than days in the year.”
- Sunny Sone in The Trace
“One of the essential accessories for performance shooting is a shot timer,” writes Caleb Giddings, a writer for “Shooting Illustrated” magazine, which is published by the National Rifle Association (NRA.)
Shot timers have been around since the 1980s. This was the decade when gun manufacturers began aggressively marketing military weapons to civilians in the United States. January 17, 1989 marked the beginning of this mass shooting era with a mass murder by a man using a weapon of war to kill children playing on their school playground in Stockton, California.
One word, “Columbine,” elevated national awareness about the Harm-for-Profit business practices at play, as well as the ever-snowballing mental health crisis among young men in the United States that has been accelerated and exacerbated by access to social media.
Most shot timers use a microphone to record shots fired from a gun, and the time between those shots or after an electronic beep. Shot timers are marketed and advertised as an “invaluable training tool,” by the NRA. These timers provide shooters hard data on shooting “performance,” allowing the gun users to precisely measure the amount of time it takes them to carry out a specific shooting task. How fast is the draw? How fast can the gun user shoot two shots, reload, and shoot two more? What is the data on “scored targets?” Is he expedient and successful?
All shot timers have an audible buzzer, a microphone that records gunshots, and the ability to review a string of fired gunshots to see the times for multiple gunshots. Most shot timers also have a "par" function. This provides gun users with a beep at the start of their shooting sessions and another beep to let the shooter know that the time has expired on their shooting session. Different gun models have more advanced features.
These beeps—heard, on average, every seven hours now in the United States in public spaces—provide a musical score of devastation and trauma. The beeps, both real and imagined, are the backdrop of horror experienced by persons all over the country who have been victims of Domestic Militarization and the celebration of Gun Culture.
Victims of mass shootings often report hearing these beeps during mass murders. Death metrics made audible. Students, cowering behind school desks and face down in school hallways; physicians trapped in storage closets at hospitals; dancers laying flat on a dance floor at nightclubs; audience members ducking behind theatre seats in movie theaters; concert attendees laying in the grass at outdoor musical festivals; congregation members belly-down in pews and hunched on top of kneelers; first graders walking down the street.
par
noun ˈpär >>
an accepted standard
specifically : a usual standard of physical condition or health
I have been in conversation with photographer Spencer Ostrander about his thoughts about Gun Culture and Public Health. He recently released Bloodbath Nation, a stand out collaboration published by Grove Atlantic with the exceptional Paul Auster that traces centuries of America’s use and abuse of guns, from the violent displacement of the native population to the forced enslavement of millions, to the bitter divide between embattled gun control and anti-gun control camps that has developed over the past 50 years and the mass shootings that dominate the United States on an hourly basis today.
This book outlines the reasons the United States is the most violent country in the Western world. Ostrander’s haunting photographs of the sites of more than thirty mass shootings in all parts of the country present a succinct but thorough examination of America at a moral, economic, social and ethical crossroads, and asks the central, burning question of our moment: What kind of society do we want to live in and what do we value?
Because American citizens and residents have been exposed to a firehose of hourly violence of every type, people are mentally saturated. The number of persons in the United States who have been killed by persons using guns is now so large, so catastrophic, so disproportionate, citizens have forged a learned helplessness. Guns are now the number one cause of death of children in the United States.
Ostrander and I discussed the Publish the Aftermath Movement, the impact documenting trauma has on mental health, and how to move the dial legislatively with curation, education, authorship and cameras.
(Portrait of Spencer Ostrander by Adam Ferguson / @adamfergusonstudio)
Soenen: We both understand that what is not in the frame in a photograph is as important as what is in the frame.
Many photographers have taken this approach: Taryn Simon, Andres Gonzalez, Félix González-Torres, Christopher Morris, and Greg Miller have often left out people or weapons and focused on aftermath, environments and place.
When you were embarking on this project, what made you choose that approach and what has the response been to date?
Ostrander: I thought of the places because they are permanent. You can’t erase a place. You can bulldoze and rebuilt it, you can set it on fire, you can make a monument or leave it as it is.
The reality is that it will always exist as the place where these atrocities occurred. I wanted the images in the book to be easily recognizable places that anyone could identify with. I wanted them to illustrate the trauma embedded in the American landscape.
I approach each project with a different method. My goal with Bloodbath Nation was to ask the viewers more questions rather than give them answers. Photographically, I wanted to be as direct and clear as possible. We have all seen the ironic photos of the MAGA hat-wearing father holding a baby in one arm. and an AR-15 in the other. It doesn’t move me. I wanted my images in the book to act as a wake-up call to the American public.
Soenen: How many victims did you meet during this project and how many surviving family members did you speak with? What commonalities did you find across their experience? What surprised you most about how gun injuries and death by gun impacts families and loved ones the most?
Ostrander: Prior to this project I was just another concerned American. I had attended various rallies in support of Common Sense Gun Legislation, but I first encountered the family members of victims of violence when I worked as a lighting technician for photojournalist Adam Ferguson. I worked on a feature for TIME Magazine called “The World Moves On And You Don’t: Parents Who Lost Children in School Shootings Find Comfort in a Group No One Wants to Join.”
I also did lighting for photojournalist Moises Saman for the feature in TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year issue called “One Year After Surviving a Mass Shooting, the Capital Gazette Journalists Refuse to Be Silenced.”
I remember watching and listening to the victims, their family members, or co-workers, the grief in their eyes, and the trauma. The statistics and media coverage became a reality for me.
Later, while working on Bloodbath Nation, I began cold calling funeral homes. I ended up going to the funeral of 21-year-old, Tyler Kobe Nichols, who was murdered on December 23, 2021, one block away from his Brooklyn home. The funeral director introduced me to Tyler’s mother, Sherma Chambers, and I told her about my project about Gun Violence. Sherma and I had an eerily strong connection when we met—an instantaneous bond. She then invited me to stay for the service. When I came home that night, I looked up Tyler’s murder and realized it wouldn’t fit with the gun project.
He was a stabbing victim.
A week later Sherma called me and invited me over to her house to discuss Tyler’s life and his death. That began a separate project, Long Live King Kobe, (ZE Books, 2022). I spent five months interviewing 17 of Tyler’s friends and family members. The result was a collaboration with Sherma, Paul (Auster) and myself. All of the interviews and photos were authorized by the family and friends, and all of the proceeds support the continuation of their foundation Long Live King Kobe.
I also met with Brooklyn based non-profit organizations that are doing important work: Save Our Streets, Wheelchairs Against Guns, God Squad/67ClergyCouncil, and am still very involved with the Long Live King Kobe Foundation.
What is striking about meeting families or victims of violence is the overwhelming loneliness and alienation from the surviving family members and friends. The inward devastation and the shame and stigma of violence that survivors face are paralyzing. There is little support for the families and friends of victims of violence outside of these localized grass roots organizations.
Soenen: Are you active in the Common Sense Gun Laws movement and how will you and your publisher bring the work to the many organizations doing advocacy and legislative work in this space?
Ostrander: While Common Sense Gun Laws would make a difference, the history of gun violence in this country is a lot deeper. It’s like a cancerous cell on the soul of America. I think it is necessary to have an honest dialogue about the history of trauma in this country, racism, slavery, genocide against the native population, mass incarceration, class warfare, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, etc. Similar to the body/mind dilemma, these ailments cannot be separated from one another. The systems of inequity work in tandem.
In order to heal I think America needs something resembling a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. With this book, Paul and I both wanted to open a deeper dialogue to the history of gun violence and where we are today. We wanted the viewer/reader to feel the totality of the gun epidemic in this country.
A portion of the proceeds for Bloodbath Nation are going to Violence Policy Center. We chose this particular organization, because they are less well known or funded than other organizations, but are doing vital research to inform these movements.
Soenen: Paul has said that you are trying to change the dialogue in this space. Since 1980 Domestic Militarization in the United States and the Military Budget has ballooned. How do we reverse the tide? On average, Americans own three guns per household.
Ostrander: The American domestic arms race continues to have debilitating affect on American society and culture. As Paul mentions in the book, even if we were to illegalize all guns, there would still be 400 million guns in circulation. The numbers are hard to understand. The only way we are going to be able to fight the Military Industrial Complex is through education and voting.
Paul writes in the book, “Peace will break out only when both sides want it, and in order for that to happen, we would first have to conduct an honest, gut-wrenching examination of who we are and who we want to be as a people going forward into the future, which necessarily would have to begin with an honest, gut-wrenching examination of who we have been in the past.”
Until we have an honest dialogue about where we have been, where we are, and where we are going, we will continue to have the same outcome.
Soenen: In the reportage and visual story telling community internationally, there is a movement afoot called “Publish the Aftermath.” This would allow families and persons with Power of Attorney to agree to releasing mass shooting victim body photos from the Medical Examiner’s office to the public. Publishers/Editors could then obtain permission to publish (online, via broadcast and in print) the injuries and death from the scenes of these mass murders with assault rifles. What is your view on that proposed approach to changing legislation?
Ostrander: I support the proposed approach of “Publish the Aftermath.” I think it is important for the public to see the graphic images of violence and to show the images of genocides.
There have been really important photographic books on violence. Two of my recommendations are Eugene Richards’s The Gun and Knife Club (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989), and Donna Ferrato’s Living with the Enemy (Aperture, 1991). These are historic documents of violence that woke the public up at the time of their publications, but would be incredibly hard to make today.
I attended a moving group show curated by Felix Hoffman in Berlin, The Last Image (c/o Gallery Berlin). It was a survey of 400 photographs of death, dating back to the beginning of the art form. I remember leaving that exhibition and thinking that this show would never be permitted to be shown in the Untied States.
Soenen: Sometimes photographers and writers are brought to their knees while shooting an image. Did any one photo do this for you over the course of this project? Open spaces have the power to haunt people more so than spaces with people.
Ostrander: I approached each location with the mindset of what it must have been like for a victim to show up to their school, their work, their place of worship, or a nightclub or concert on the day, where their lives would forever change. It is difficult to separate the images fixed in your mind by the media. It difficult to undo the salacious nature of the coverage.
When I went to the different locations, I felt as if the real places I was standing in couldn’t be the sites of such atrocities. I was in disbelief. The mundanity and the silence were haunting.
While photographing the location of the Route 91 Harvest Concert in Las Vegas, I encountered the wife of a shooting victim who was present that night. Outside the barrier she fell to the ground and wept. I held her. I cried. I told her about my project and she told me that her husband had survived, but he was living with terrible injuries that dictate their lives now. She then told me that the future of the site was to become a Las Vegas Raiders parking lot. She asked me what people do in NFL parking lots. Not being a football fan, I was unaware. But, she answered “they tail-gate, they urinate…they will be urinating on the gravestones.”
Soenen: Thank you for sharing that intimate camera-down moment.
On a much lighter note: Sony, Nikon, Hasselblad, Canon, Leica or…?
Ostrander: I use Sony, Nikon and Leica interchangeably. It’s weird, I know, but I always shoot on different systems simultaneously, that way I have back ups if one defaults.
Soenen: Photographic mentors or influences, living or dead?
Ostrander: I spent a decade working for other photographers and worked with Christopher Anderson for eight years. I also worked as a freelancer with Robert Clark, Jim Goldberg, Brigette Lacombe, and many others. They were all very instrumental in my learning and kept me afloat.
Greatest influences are Sylvia Plachy, Andre Kertesz, Imogen Cunningham, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Eugene Richards, Emmit Gowin and Gueorgui Pinkhassov.
Soenen: Saint Tuesday in Tribeca, dive bar in Red Hook, Barbès in BK or Brunch in East Village?
Ostrander: LunÀtico in Bed Stuy.
Soenen Favorite band or vocalist?
Ostrander: My wife, Sophie Auster.
Soenen: Cynical or hopeful about the future? And, why?
Ostrander: Trying that hope thing but I would say critical rounded up to cynical. The rise of fascism, the neo-liberalism realities and the general aversion to compassion in this country deeply concern me.
Soenen: What are reading or what photo books are you reading now?
Ostrander: Currently reading Oreo by Fran Ross. Photographically, I continuously go back to the books of Eugene Richards. His work stands the test of time and he remains to have one of the most empathetic and present eyes.
Soenen: Subway, skateboard or bicycle?
Ostrander: CitiBike and Subway.
Soenen: Unionize photographers or lone wolf?
Ostrander: Unionize. Having been a studio manager, set builder, photographer assistant and lighting designer, I feel strongly that the industry needs safeguards in terms of holding clients responsible for on-time payments, healthcare coverage, unemployment support, Medical Leave and more progressive Labor Laws in general.
Soenen: Verite or studio?
Ostrander: All depends. Most the time in the studio you’re just replicating natural light, so when you have it it’s wonderful.
Soenen: Everything bagel or plain?
Ostrander: Poppy Seed and Whitefish.
Soenen: Thank you, Spencer.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FOR READERS
Brady Campaign
Chicago Cred
Moms Demand Action
EveryTown for Gun Safety
Giffords Law
March Fourth
March for Our Lives
My Block My Hood My City
Rochester Youth Violence Partnership
Students Demand Action
Violence Prevention Research Program at University of California, Davis