RICOCHET

Violence is a handiwork. Someone made it with their hands. The bullet is the finger that pulled the trigger. It touches many things on its trajectory, its story written in a blind instant. But there’s another sort of consequence. How can our forensics account for what never was? All possible configurations of guilt and innocence occur - but this work isn’t about that. Violence reverberates through the lives touching the lives that it touches, and on like a web. It changes all of us. That irrevocable alteration in the possible futures which might have been…that’s the real ricochet.

The guns in this series were used in violent crimes and impounded by the Atlanta Police Department. This work is a protest against gun violence. Each image began at the Department’s headquarters, was made once, was torn, and then became something similar, but irrevocably different, in a process-trajectory which mirrors the reverberation of violence through our communities. The wet-plate collision process and polarization invoke the human residue which will always cover these guns.