“I first became interested in photography after my son died,” tells Dr. Greg Gulbransen, a pediatrician practicing in suburban Long Island. “I found the camera to be a comfortable way to spend time alone with nature as I was walking through ocean beaches here photographing shore birds. After the birds I moved onto bears. I soon realized it was people who resonate more with me hence I gradually switched to documentary photography.”
The death of a child is enough to throw any parent. But Gulbransen’s loss was even more tragic than can be fathomed. In 2002, he mistakenly backed his car into his young son, Cameron, who died in his arms. In the tragedy’s wake, Gulbransen made it his mission to force car makers to install rear view cameras in all new cars. His interest in documentary photography eventually led him back to the Bronx, where he had done some of his medical school training. He began by photographing a group of kids in the neighborhood who rode bikes together as a way to avoid the gang life in the neighborhood. Their motto was “Bikes Up, Guns Down.”
“Gradually that switched over to more of a gun theme as I realized guns were killing the youth in this country at alarming rates and that these kids were around guns all the time,” Gulbransen explains. “I was shocked. I also noted many people in the Bronx in wheelchairs and ultimately learned that was because of spinal cord injuries from being shot. Eventually it all got to me and I decided to portray the gunshot victims.”
Through the bike group, he met Malik, a member of the local set of the Crips, a notorious street gang of the neighborhood. On a summer night in 2018, Malik had left his apartment to go and pick up a sandwich for dinner. But while on this innocent errand, he was shot by a rival gang member. The bullet tore through his spine, instantly paralyzing him from the chest down. When the rival gang realized that they had not killed him, the gang continued to target him. They also went after both Malik’s brother and his best friend. They were also shot but survived their shootings as well.
“Malik and I hit it off immediately and he actually very much wanted the photos as he felt his story was worth telling,” says Gulbransen. “The thing was without formal training I had to learn about documentary photography. To this day I still have zero training in how to do this genre. I decided to take some photos to capture the dangers of gun violence. I soon realized there was a story here and his family and I got along so well that it turned into a 3-to-4-year story. In fact, I still visit and likely will never leave.”
Even before the shootings, Malik had grown up surrounded by crime. His grandfather was Harvey Richardson, who had a criminal career that spanned four decades. Sean, Malik’s father, also had a long criminal career, and did time in the Supermax prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. But it wasn’t just the men in the family. The crack epidemic that ravaged the United States in the 1990s also touched him. “Malik also told me that his grandmother made and sold crack when he was a young kid. He told me he would watch her make crack on the stove. As a paraplegic, Malik’s mother, Eyanna, is thankful that Malik is confined to a wheelchair. She maintains if not then he would have done all sorts of bad things and ‘who knows that the hell he would have done to this world.’”
Malik was 18 when he was shot and is now 24. He and his family live in the Mitchel Houses in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. The community is made of a diverse population and most residents live in one of three very large buildings in an area known for its high gun, crime, and drug rates. Malik himself lives in a small room at the rear of an apartment shared by 8 people. His room consists of his bed, a desk, and his PlayStation. The rest of the small space is filled by his wheelchair.
There are no nurses or aids to help with Malik’s care, so during the day his mother takes care of him and his medical issues, like changing his diaper and catheter, while his father cares for him at night. As a leader in the Crips, he is also constantly visited by other gang members, who come to talk, plan and help take care of their leader. Malik is reluctant to go outside, unless it is the middle of the day and only with close friends. He can’t go down certain streets or enter certain neighborhoods, for there are still rival gang members who try again to kill him.
“As a physician, it was a way to explore one facet of the epidemic of gun violence in this country,” writes Gulbransen in his book Say Less, dedicated to this project and published by GOST Books. “There are shootings every day in the five boroughs of New York City and the Bronx is the worst. But across the country, gun violence and the availability of guns is a public health emergency. The effects are devastating. The physician in me wants to show people who don’t live in areas with high rates of gun violence how terrible it can be in these places, how complicated the problem is, and how far-reaching the effects of the gun-violence epidemic are. The photographer in me is trying to show what it’s like to be a victim of gun violence while also being a part of the problem.”
As one looks deeper, and thinks more about the issues at play, about gun violence Malik’s story also becomes more complex and nuanced, as Gulbransen points out as well. “I’m trying to complicate things for readers by hopefully showing that passing judgment on people like Malik might be more difficult, morally speaking, than they think. There are a lot of victims here and, yes, some of them are perpetrators, too. I’m definitely not saying these guys are saints — they’ve all made choices, and they should absolutely be held accountable for those choices — but they’re victims too.”
Say Less is published by GOST Books and will be released in August 2024. Pre-orders can be placed on GOST’s website here.
