[Leica] new series: americans and their firearms

[chandos at cox.net (Chandos Michael Brown)]

Interesting, Kyle.

For many years I had a sort of 'installation' piece at home composed of
various bits of "found" ammunition--ranging from four 12 gauge shotgun
shells that a guy traded me for a beer in the late, lamented Okie Joes bar
in Albuquerque, NM (ca. 1973) to a handful of .22 shorts that I found in the
gutter in front of my apartment building on Garden St. in Cambridge, MA (ca.
1982).  Before I boxed it and stored it in the garage, I'd accumulated over
30 rounds of various calibers over a period of about 20 years--including a
belt of 7.62 LMG live blanks that I recovered from the woods at Quantico,
MCAS, in the mid-80s.

The curious thing about all this is that I simply found this ammunition
laying about, never purchased any of it; it was just sort of there.  Weapons
sometimes seem so thick in our culture that I wonder whether ammo doesn't
merely materialize out of the Hoppe's-soaked atmosphere.

In the event, a cool project, though the second image doesn't look as though
it were made by a 6x6, and I wish that you hadn't cropped the feet of
Superboy and his AK-47-toting dad in the foreground.

Cheers!

Chandos


-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces+chandos=cox.net@leica-users.org
[mailto:lug-bounces+chandos=cox.net@leica-users.org] On Behalf Of kyle
cassidy
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 8:41 PM
To: lug@leica-users.org
Subject: [Leica] new series: americans and their firearms


Last week I was staggering home from the local watering hole, content in 
that I'd started a bar fight between a group of hippies and some mennonites 
and gotten myself out unscathed and in posession of a bottle of scotch that 
I hadn't paid for, when i stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk and found 
myself up-ended on the curb. A large, white 1972 hard top Cadillac Coupe de 
Ville (the two door model) with a big silver hood scoop on the front broke 
most of my fall and eased me to the Earth where I was considering staying 
for a while while I regained some sense of balance. As I lay there, a window

opened on the second floor of the house in front of me and a little old 
lady -- maybe 75 or 80 with a bun of silver grey hair and a black and fuscha

house coat stuck her head out the window, brandishing a large silver handgun

and shouting at me to get off of her car before she aerated me like a lawn. 
Rightly motivated I stumbled to my feet while she fired a warning shot into 
the trees. I had sobered up quite a bit and took the remaining blocks to 
consider that it would be a Right Neat project to do a series of portraits 
of American gun owners, with their guns, in their houses. Something that my 
old mentor [name redacted] might even approve of. I dusted off the old 6x6, 
packed a lunch and some bullets, and went off in search of America. My goal 
is to do one a week until someone gives me a show at the Whitney.

In any event, here's the first in a series:

http://www.netaxs.com/~cassidy/ago/donno-judy-4b.jpg

http://www.netaxs.com/~cassidy/ago/donno-judy-7.jpg 


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