What a story! A giant project! So many images so far and many hundreds of miles traveled... Wow!
It was important to me, early on, to take photographs in all 50 US states. I am playing off the quintessential American tradition of checking off how many states you’ve visited and the travel guides about “the best _____ in each state.” I’m also playing off the tradition of travelers bringing objects on their trips and photographing them in front of landmarks, like the “traveling gnome” that was popular a few years ago.
Maureen Cain
And for every well-known incident in the series, there are plenty that are quite obscure.
Yes, the majority of gun violence in the US goes unnoticed. That’s the problem. Mass shootings and school shootings get a lot of attention, but they make up a very small percentage of US gun deaths.
How have you compiled your list of sites to shoot?
When I’m selecting sites, I think about the entire series (250 photographs so far) because I want to represent the diversity
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of America in this project. I want to cover the variety of geography of the country. I try to get a balance of rural and urban sites. I want to represent as many types of gun violence as I can, both historic and contemporary. I want to include groups of people affected by gun violence, so in addition to the mass shootings and school shootings, I make sure I have photos about domestic violence against women, border violence against immigrants, police brutality against Black Americans, hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community, genocide of Native Americans, the contemporary phenomenon of the murder of indigenous women, the ongoing epidemic of veteran suicide—the list is, unfortunately, very long.
Sometimes, I do it backwards and first select the site, then find the incident of gun violence that happened there. The sad reality is that there is so much gun violence in the US that I can find a shooting in almost every location I visit. I see something that looks like it would make a good photograph, then I look for a murder or suicide that happened nearby. More often than not, I have several to pick from. I was in West Virginia and saw signs for a biscuit restaurant and I wanted a snack, so I pulled into the parking lot. Turns out at that exact location an employee had been shot and killed. I grabbed a handful of biscuit-colored bullet casings and stuck them in a biscuit. I took that photograph with my phone because I was inside a busy restaurant and didn’t want to draw attention to what I was doing.
So much traveling means logistics. How do you make it work?
This project is funded by my credit cards, so I travel on a tight budget and I move quickly to cover more distance and stretch my resources. Last summer I traveled to 22 states and did 125 photoshoots in six weeks. Each night, I make a plan for the following day. I select two or three sites to visit the next morning and do as much research as I can about each shooting