FAMILY PHOTO GUN SERIES

I was really unsettled by some of the images, not only because of the weapons, but because they depicted people, who, despite living in the same country as me, seemed to be so deeply enmeshed in a culture that is so different from mine. When I first saw some of the portraits, they stopped me in my tracks. Warzel: On one hand, it must be quite validating that your work is having such an effect on people. Gabriele Galimberti: It’s weird and perverse how I’m getting so much attention after such a big tragedy. How does it feel to see this work, which is now a few years old, go viral? Often, they’re posted without attribution, which is awful and I’m sure quite frustrating for you. The cover of The AmerigunsĬharlie Warzel: In the past few days, I’ve seen your “Ameriguns” portraits everywhere. All photos have been shared with Galimberti’s permission. This conversation has been edited for clarity. I reached out and spoke with him on Tuesday about the origins of his project, what he learned about the United States’ gun culture from traveling the country and spending time with proud, intensely devoted firearm owners in their homes, and what it’s like to have his work go viral during a time of profound tragedy. These threads seemed at odds with the spirit of Galimberti’s project. As you might expect, the comments were often angry, denouncing those in the photos as disgusting and sick, or equating them with the kind of mass-shooting violence we’ve seen recently in Buffalo and Uvalde. Each thread racked up hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets. Over the weekend, I watched as Galimberti’s photos were posted and reposted in Twitter threads, often without attribution to him or his work. There's a very popular thread going around of americans with their massive gun collections and i feel compelled to say that those images are taken, without attribution, from gabriele galimberti's book 'the ameriguns' which you can purchase here. He believes those are “the four big values that keep Americans so attached to guns.” Galimberti organized the book into four sections: freedom, family, passion, and style. The book, which also examines the history of the Second Amendment, is a holistic and bracing look at the United States’ complicated history of gun ownership.

This two-year-long project-for which he won the World Press Photo Contest in 2021- culminated in an amazing book, The Ameriguns, in which Galimberti interviews his subjects in an attempt to analyze why firearms are so deeply ingrained in American culture.

FAMILY PHOTO GUN SERIES

The photo is one of a series of 40 portraits that Galimberti, an Italian photographer, took of U.S. It is shocking to imagine this amount of firepower in one household, and yet the photo suggests that there’s something very banal about this level of gun ownership in America. It is a jarring portrait, due to the amount of weaponry but also to the casual posing of the family. There are so many guns that, in order to fit the family’s longer rifles in the frame, they had to be laid out on the roof of the house. There are so many guns that it looks as if the deck is made of weapons. They are surrounded by more than 100 firearms (long rifles, as well as dozens of handguns and semi-automatic rifles with scopes), each one intricately laid out in a proud display. The first one I saw was of a family of four on their back deck, with one child on a tricycle.

Not long after news broke of the shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, Gabriele Galimberti’s photos started appearing on my social-media feeds.

Family photo gun