RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

The Guns

No matter what your politics are, no matter where you come from and as long as you are not a combat veteran or a victim of violent crime, you’d be lying if you said that guns weren’t sexy. Why? That’s easy. Guns = power. Power = sexy.

Until last Friday, I had no idea of the photographic potential of the dead eye of an M-16 pointed directly the reflective glass of my camera. Actually I like that effect a lot. A gun turned against you, lined up directly with your own sightline looks like an extended metallic and hollow dead eye staring back at you. The barrel stretches deep into darkness like an infinite void.

But enough indulgent description of this shit, this is a good story:

The photo’s of guns came into being when my friend Colin called me up and asked if I’d be interested in doing some promotional shots for his band Seizure 17. He wanted photos with guns. Since none of us own any guns, he decided to survey some area stores to see if anyone would mind if we all came in and did the shoot on site. Two calls later and we had our spot. The time was set for Friday at 6pm.

Across the street from I-95 (right next to the Zoe Strauss site specific gallery) there sits a large stucco warehouse. If you make your way around to the side of the building, go through an open chain link fence, walk through the parking lot and through a dingy looking door you’ll find a darkened staircase. But let me stop here for a minute and give a little more background.

I haven’t spent a lot of time in gun stores. Beyond that, going blindly into the seediest gun store I’ve ever seen with the intention of taking a set of reckless gun toting photos made me slightly uncomfortable. Did I mention that we had a small child with us? Expecting a very uncomfortable experience, if they even let us do the shoot at all, we entered the building.

It was about 7:30PM when we started up the staircase. Jamie (bassist) let me go first. I ran up at full speed and was the first through the door. The place was smaller than I thought it would be. For some reason, I was expecting something bright and shiny, like the gun counter at a southern Wal-Mart. The place was more like the fucked up child of a hardware store and a porn shop stuck in the corner of a bus station. But we were in and I was just the photographer. I stepped into a dirty box filled room and let Colin do the talking. Aside from the boxes, there was a folding table, an old 14 inch color TV (playing golf) an ancient cigarette machine with an out of order sign pasted over it and an even more ancient soda machine. I leaned up against the wall and watched through the (bulletproof?) Plexiglas as a couple of young guys in wifebeaters blasted the living shit out of some paper targets.

The next thing I heard was the gregarious store manager shout excitedly to Jamie, “you want an M-16? You gotta be holding something everyone’ll recognize.” Not only was he ok with letting us do whatever we wanted, he openly encouraged it. Actually his encouragement was so strong that it started to become a little unnerving in itself. “Point it at his/her head.” He kept saying. “Hold that gun like you’re about to kill someone.”

As for the shooting, (camera) it took some time for the band to relax, but in a few minutes things were running smoothly. I never fully relaxed, having a hard time thinking up good cues and positioning the shots, but the guns did their work. Out of about 85 photos, plenty were workable, which is more than I could have asked for.

The photos, bizarre conceptually from the start and intended in the end for a rock band, have been fucked with a lot in processing. I felt like this shoot needed to be distorted, deep shadows, brighter colors, jarring contrasts. Make it look like something out of Repo Man, grainy and harsh.

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Another thing I had fun with was creative cropping. A couple of terrible throw away shots turned into some of my favorites… even when all you do is crop to emphasize the thing that makes the full photo look like crap.

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For a couple photos not included in this set, click here and here. And that’s all for now.