“When I first received a news alert that there had been a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde – a town less than 90 miles from where I grew up – I was stunned. Although mass shootings are frequent, it’s easy to feel removed from tragedy when it happens in far away, unfamiliar places. My false sense of security was ripped away after gunman launched an attack in a classroom so close to my home,” photographer Callaghan O’Hare said. “I drove to Uvalde hours after finding out about the shooting. When I arrived, the presence of the media was overwhelming. It felt like there were as many journalists working in the community as there were residents. We were all making similar images. We took pictures that echoed those captured after Sandy Hook and Parkland – pictures we all knew would inevitably be made again.”
On its side, The Onion, the satirical American newspaper, has a recurring headline that it publishes after nearly every mass shooting in the United States: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
Each example of the article runs about 200 words, updates the details, including the location of the shooting and the number of victims and has comments by a fictitious local resident. But otherwise, it is the same. The series began with the May 27th 2014 shooting in Isla Vista, California near the campus of University of California Santa Barbara. The latest being the December 16, 2024 one, for the school shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin.
In a September 2024 article in The Washington Post, it was reported that there have been 417 school shootings since the Columbine High School Massacre in 1999. Subsequently around 394,000 students have experienced gun violence in their schools.
The exhibition entitled “School Shootings in America”, on view at the Bronx Documentary Center until March 16 looks at America’s epidemic of gun violence, and profiles some of the thousands of young people and families who have been affected by school shootings since the Columbine ones, through the work of 4 photographers. Zackary Canepari, Tamir Kalifa, Callaghan O’Hare and Barbara Davidson all look at gun violence through their own unique images.
Canepari, in his series “Thoughts and Prayers”, examines the culture of active shooter preparedness and the normalcy of mass violence that has calcified in America and become commonplace for an entire generation born into a post-Columbine world.
Kalifa documented the lives of the families of the 21 victims of the Uvalde, Texas school shooting as they have slowly been working their way through a wilderness of grief, anger, despair, frustration and confusion – searching, if not for peace, then at least purpose.
O’Hare highlights the aftermath of the school shooting at Robb Elementary School and the months that followed in Uvalde, Texas. The photographer also points out how in the wake of the tragedy, parents became activists, schools built security fences, and vigils were held to mark the painful passage of time. Ultimately, Uvalde joined a long list of places across the country shaped, molded, and remade by gun violence.
Barbara Davidson shows the scars of gun violence, both seen and unseen. These include the stories of Melody Ross, who was gunned down in 2009 at a high school football game, Davien Graham who was paralyzed from the waist down after being shot at the age of 16 at a church where he volunteered, and Deserae Turner who was shot in the head by a classmate in 2017, among them. Their stories may fade from the headlines but for the survivors of gun violence the pain and trauma casts a long shadow for the rest of their lives.
Canepari’s interest in the topic came about when he had a child. In doing research, he couldn’t believe how normalized the idea of gun violence in schools had become, and how the direction the country was going seemed set. “My work here isn’t directly about gun violence. But the backdrop of gun violence in which my work takes place is important to help contextualize,” said Canepari. “First of all, gun violence is the number one killer of kids in America. Sit with that. Secondly, school shootings are actually pretty rare. But shootings near schools are wildly common. The Trace recently released a 10-year study on this. 57 times PER DAY there is a shooting within 500 yards of a school. That’s 4 city blocks. My kid’s school has had 2 or 3 this year alone.”
For O’Hare, the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas removed her false sense of security, while how fast the news cycle moved on struck her. “The news cycle began to move on in the days that followed the shooting. I was struck by how easily the American public could let the school shooting fade into its memory. As a journalist, I felt obligated to make sure that didn’t happen. I didn’t want viewers to have the luxury of looking away,” said O’Hare. “I wanted to document how the community changed, what the start of a new school year was like, and how summertime – a season of joy and freedom for children – had been fundamentally altered in Uvalde that May. I felt like Americans needed to continue sitting with the reality of what had happened to this close-knit community even if most of the media had moved on.”
In a deeply divided America, where any attempt to change gun laws becomes an overt political event, one can ask one specific question: what do these photographs say about the world in which Americans live? “The people conducting the drills or training the teachers or manufacturing the products aren’t the problem. They are a byproduct of the real problem” Canepari feels. “The problem is that Gun violence is clearly a public health issue in our country and in most cases training and products and lockdown drills are being offered as the solutions. But are they the right solution?”
In an era of mass gun violence and where many are almost desensitized to both the shooting events themselves, and the scenes that inevitably follow, O’Hare hopes on her side that her images provokes more than consciousness.”I hope viewers are struck by the youth of many of the people in my photographs. They are not adults. They are children who want to attend school and come home alive. I hope my pictures remind people that it’s our job to protect them. I want people to see themselves and the children they love in these images. In doing so, I hope the viewer not only empathizes with the people in my pictures, but also recognizes that unless we take action, this preventable tragedy could become their reality one day.”
“School Shootings in America”, on view at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York from February 7 through March 16. More information can be found here.
