Saturday, December 26, 2009
Armed in America, a Book by Photojournalist Kyle Cassidy
Freelance photojournalist, Kyle Cassidy’s photographs have been published in the New York Times, Baaron’s Financial, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He’s known for his fashion and portrait photography, but his articles deal mostly with technology. During the 2004, he developed an interest in the issues surrounding gun ownership and began to photography gun owners.
Over a two year period, Kyle criss-crossed the States, travelling 15,000 miles to photograph gun owners in their homes and ask them one question: “Why do you own a gun.” This resulted in the 200+ page book, “Armed in America” of which he says: “This isn’t a book about guns. It’s a book about people.”
His words on the scope of the project:
Whether it’s 39% or 50% of Americans, it’s still an awful lot of people. I started wondering just who they were, what they looked like, and how they lived. Such was the genesis of Armed America: Portraits of American Gun Owners in Their Homes.
The idea was to photograph a hundred gun owners, in their homes, and do a gallery show. I figured this would take about two years. But very soon after I started, it became evident that my ambitions were too low. My mailbox flooded with letters from people I didn’t know wanting to participate — I realized that I could probably photograph a hundred people in two months, but it wasn’t a number of people that was important, it was their stories — a cowboy in Texas, a survivalist in Montana, a deer hunter in Pennsylvania, a sheriff in Georgia, a soldier in Idaho….
What I really needed, I realized, was to get moving, to drive across the country and find America somewhere between here and there.
Product Details:
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Krause Publications (2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0896895432
ISBN-13: 978-0896895430
Product Dimensions: 12.2 x 9.2 x 1.2 inches
Visit the book’s website:
