Final analysis
Damien Demolder considers... The Ameriguns by Gabriele Galimberti
America has been in the news a lot recently. Coverage of the USA election was such that we might almost have thought it something we could vote in ourselves, and I’m sure more people in the UK took sides than would throw a passing glance at our own political affairs. It was also one of those occasions, like Brexit, where we had plenty of opportunity to stare open-mouthed at the opinions of ‘regular’ citizens being interviewed on the street.
Europeans, sometimes jealously, like to mock Americans, while ignoring the fact that every country has its own fair share of ‘interesting folk’, but maybe our friends across the pond stand out for their sheer numbers and diversity of extreme ideas.
One area in which the USA really does stand out from the rest of the world is in its ownership of guns, and it is this that Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti explored in a photo essay that’s been nominated by the World Press Photo contest this year. His Ameriguns series is exceptional, and I urge you to look it up in the showcase of nominated portraits on the WPP website.
Galimberti travelled the length of the USA to photograph not just folks who have a gun or two, but people who own far more guns than hands. His essay was based on the amazing/not-surprising findings of the Small Arms Survey that says ‘half of all the firearms owned by private citizens in the world, for non-military purposes, are in the USA’. We are told that with a population of about 328 million, its residents own 393 million guns. Considering 68% of the population says it doesn’t own a gun at all (Gallup, 2020), those Small Arms Survey figures are all the more astonishing.
Many of Galimberti’s pictures show the owner with his/her collection of tens, if not hundreds, of firearms arranged around on the floor in the way we see photographers on social media displaying their camera kit. The image on show here though is styled a little differently and really struck me.
While most of the other shots in the series show people I’m not likely to encounter, this I found much more haunting for its sense of ‘normalcy’. This isn’t some freak-show but a picture that takes us to the heart of what looks like a ‘normal’ family. Is this what all ‘normal’ families in the USA have at home? Of course it isn’t, but it suggests what we can’t see from the other side of the drapes. What scares me most is that a seemingly average household can have a weapons store that appears sufficient for a major insurrection.
Photographically, of course, the picture is exceptional – which is why it has such an impact. The domestic scene in the left third of the frame – with sporty mom checking her yoga schedule and a peacefully sleeping dog – and the armed patriot inside his gun room in the other two-thirds makes for an alarming juxtaposition. Had the man been looking into the frame we might justifiably expect him to emerge at any moment and contribute to the mass-shooting statistics, but in facing us we can see he isn’t there to attack the home but to protect it. We might wonder what kind of a neighbourhood they live in, but the presence of the Stars and Stripes suggests a fear of something altogether more sinister. Galimberti’s use of warm and cold tones is laid on to emphasise the contrast between the two domestic states, and ensure we pick up on the horror of the situation. It is very carefully lit and astonishingly well done, and the photographer’s meticulous process reveals a good deal about his own feelings on the subject.
I wonder if domestic gun ownership is based on fear or liberty, or the liberty to shoot at the things we fear most. I’m not sure ‘Reds Under the Bed’ is still a thing, but it’s good to know there’s some lurking threat worthy of our anxiety.
www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/ photocontest/2021