“The Final Moments: Gun Violence in Brooklyn, New York” is the first in a series of projects I am working on that are intended to inspire discourse and promote action around the gun violence crisis in the United States. The photographs in this project were taken at the sites of fatal shootings in Brooklyn, New York that took place between 2016 and 2018.

I used video footage, news article descriptions, photographs, and geocodes to determine as precisely as I could (exact or within steps of) the location of each shooting or of the victim’s collapse. Rather than pointing the camera at the crime scene, the photographs are taken from the vantage point of the victims so as to ask viewers to momentarily put themselves “in the shoes” of the victims and imagine what the experience of their final moments might have been. I took the photographs at the same time of day and during the same season as the shooting. Photographs were taken using a wide-angle lens at an oblique angle, to replicate the angle of someone whose head might be lying on the ground. I edited the photographs – adding a vignette and soft focus effect - to evoke a tunnel vision experience that is believed to happen when the brain abruptly loses blood supply at the time of death. 

Every day, 45 lives are taken by gun homicide across the United States (in addition to 65 taken by gun suicide), yet media coverage of these deaths is far less robust than it is after mass shootings, which account for less than one percent of the country’s gun deaths. Americans are over 26 times more likely to be killed by guns than people in other high-income countries. Even though New York State has fairly stringent gun control laws, guns flood in from other states. Out of state guns are responsible for 9 out of 10 shootings in New York. Gun violence is all of our problem as U.S. residents, and something we need to solve together. “The Final Moments” aims to raise awareness and move viewers to take action. 

The series was part of United Photo Industries’ and Four Freedom Park’s “Capture Your Freedom” exhibition in the summer of 2018, and was also featured at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn during June 2018 (Gun Violence Awareness Month). Click here to view additional images.