No child should ever take a gun, not even for a good cause, I told myself when I learned that Greg Cohen, a Newtown photographer, had created a collection of photographs of armed children. But then I remembered that Newtown is the city where the second most terrifying shooting in the United States took place almost a year ago, a massacre in which two dozen children and six adults from a school died.
Cohen was born and raised in Newtown. Resident in Los Angeles, after the shooting he traveled to his hometown where he has found, even now, tears in the eyes of its citizens. He decided to try to raise people's awareness and published in his blog the project he planned to create. Crowds of parents turned and contacted him so that his children could be part. The result is called "Farewell to arms" and achieves exactly what the author intends: the image of a child accessing a weapon makes us stand on end.
A story behind the photographs
The work will be exhibited tomorrow Thursday, December 12, in the gallery The Perfect Exposure of the Angels. That's where he took the photographs of the children. He talked to the parents, talked to the children to explain why they would appear photographed with weapons. First he prepared the photographs, placed the children where he wanted and, when he had everything ready, he gave them the weapon just to take the picture.
He asked them to think that they were holding a stick, or a cushion, and that they also saw themselves in some situation in which they had felt rejection, something that would generate indifference or discomfort in their faces. Something like getting the children, without speaking, and the images, without texts, to shout something like "Are you kidding? Weapons? You have to do something!". Obviously, nobody allowed the children to make a glimpse of wanting to play with them that, by the way, were made of plastic.
The author hopes that the exhibition can travel to other galleries and museums, moved, according to him, for an ideal and not for the prominence:
To think that I am exploiting Newtown or taking advantage of a tragedy of a magnitude like this ..., there is nothing really in it.
The images will go on sale for $ 1,500 each and part of the proceeds will go to the financing of campaigns for the control of firearms in the US.
Awaking consciences?
In Spain there are no firearms in every home. Americans do not understand how we can live without them. In fact it seems to be a real madness that we do not have them. We, on the other hand, believe that what is really crazy is that children grow in environments where having guns is normal and I no longer tell you what we think when we see that any child can take a gun and shoot himself because he is not right in the head.
Yes, Cohen has achieved, at least in my case, what is proposed: raise awareness, create controversy, that we see the photos of the children and think that it is absurd, that it is delectable and repulsive to create a world in which children see normal to have an instrument whose sole objective is to kill another human being.
