What the Viral Gun Photographer Has to Say About His Subjects
“When people use my photos to judge the people in them, that is a mistake. The real judgment in my work is on the society that allows this.”
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. The first one I saw was of a family of four on their back deck, with one child on a tricycle. 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. There are so many guns that it looks as if the deck is made of weapons. 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. It is a jarring portrait, due to the amount of weaponry but also to the casual posing of the family. 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.
The photo is one of a series of 40 portraits that Galimberti, an Italian photographer, took of U.S. firearm owners posing with their guns. 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. 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. Galimberti organized the book into four sections: freedom, family, passion, and style. He believes those are “the four big values that keep Americans so attached to guns.”
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. https://t.co/MOTTZ6LG7m
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) May 30, 2022
Over the weekend, I watched as Galimberti’s photos were posted and reposted in Twitter threads, often without attribution to him or his work. Each thread racked up hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets. 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. These threads seemed at odds with the spirit of Galimberti’s project. 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.
This conversation has been edited for clarity. All photos have been shared with Galimberti’s permission.
Charlie Warzel: In the past few days, I’ve seen your “Ameriguns” portraits everywhere. Often, they’re posted without attribution, which is awful and I’m sure quite frustrating for you. How does it feel to see this work, which is now a few years old, go viral?
Gabriele Galimberti: It’s weird and perverse how I’m getting so much attention after such a big tragedy. I don’t know how to feel.
Warzel: On one hand, it must be quite validating that your work is having such an effect on people. When I first saw some of the portraits, they stopped me in my tracks. 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. The photos are an immediate, visceral reminder of the intensity and devotion of gun culture in the U.S. But on the other hand, it feels like your work is being used by others to fuel a lot of anger and frustration. There are a lot of people stealing your work to use it to fight an online culture war during a really difficult moment in America, and that feels like it’s not quite in the spirit of your project. How do you feel about the success of the work?
Galimberti: The success of my photos at the moment is because my photos are really easy to understand. You don’t need to be an expert in photography or even guns to understand the message. It’s impossible to look at these images and not see what’s there. And that makes my photos so easy to share and to be used for a certain, sometimes negative, communication. But I think when people use my photos to judge the people in them, that is a mistake. The real judgment in my work is on the society that allows this. The real problem isn’t these 40 people I photographed; it is the regulations and the culture that permits it.
When you look at the last two mass shootings, it is absurd that kids celebrating their 18th birthday can go buy guns but couldn’t go to a bar and drink. It’s probably far too easy to buy guns in this country. The focus should be on the regulation and not on these people. These people I photographed are buying guns because they can and are free to do so. And so if you are shocked by seeing this family with 200 guns, then maybe the real problem is there are no regulations that would keep them from obtaining these guns. And I want to be clear that it’s not only guns I photographed, but also people with bazookas and flamethrowers, all legally obtained. They’re free to buy them.
I’d never shot a gun before three years ago. But doing this project I was offered and shot many guns, and I have to be honest and say that sometimes it was very fun. I can understand the attraction to guns. I can understand why, as a human, you can be attracted to certain objects even if they are dangerous. The problem is not the attraction. It’s about the regulation. The problem is when a shooting like the one in Texas happens, the culture argues about giving guns to teachers instead of regulating them. It’s weird and perverse.
Warzel: I think your work is touching that very raw nerve in American culture and politics right now. There is a group of people seeing these photos of people posing proudly with a militia’s worth of tactical firepower and asking, How on earth do we allow this, legally?
Galimberti: You know, it’s odd—I’m getting hundreds of requests to talk about my work in the aftermath of this mass shooting, but they are all international. You are one of the few requests from the USA.
Warzel: Why do you think that is?
Galimberti: I think the topic is somehow untouchable for you all in the U.S. It is so dividing. I’ve had two different reactions when I show my work in the USA. Some people see it as glorifying gun culture. I now get so many requests from gun owners who say, “I have so many more guns than the people in your book; you should photograph me!” On the other side, there is an intense reaction from people who are disturbed by this, and they do not want to see these photos because they are troubled by them.
Warzel: An important element of your work seems to be not to judge people, but rather to document the intensity of this culture. What do you think The Ameriguns illustrates about our relationship and obsession with guns in this country?
Galimberti: Some people won’t agree, but I didn’t photograph crazy people. What I photographed is actually what seemed like reasonably normal behavior in the U.S. And my subjects were not anywhere close to the stereotypes of American gun culture. I didn’t only photograph white people in cowboy hats in Texas. I went all across the country to places like Hawaii and found all kinds of people. I photographed people who told me they voted for Obama. What I think my project does is that it shows how deep this relationship to guns really is. One in three Americans has guns, and the relationship to them goes from one side of society to the other. And of course the majority I photographed are Republicans, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Guns in America are not connected to [just one] specific ideology. [Editor’s note: Polling does show that Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to say they own a gun.] It’s really deep into the culture. It’s quite normal to have such a big number of guns in the house.
Warzel: What got you interested in this project? Why did you want to enmesh yourself in this particular part of American life?
Galimberti: I was curious to understand more. I love the U.S. The first person I fell in love with 20 years ago was a Texan. I spent a lot of time in Texas and have wonderful memories of that time. When I decided to do the project I was simply curious to understand more about guns. In Italy, this is not the relationship we have with guns. I found out that a few of my friends in the U.S. were gun fanatics. I was so surprised because these were not the people I imagined were gun fanatics. Knowing some of my friends had bought so many guns got me interested. When I discovered that there were more private guns than people in the United States—roughly 1.4 guns per person—I was shocked. But I was even more interested when I found that only one-third of the population owns guns. And that is just the registered guns. There are so many that are unregistered. [Editor’s note: A widely cited 2016 survey of 4,000 gun owners also found that three percent of the United States’ population owns half of its guns.]
But my intention isn’t to judge. That’s not my role. I’m not saying the people in these photos are crazy or right or wrong. I wanted to meet them and to take their portraits alongside their guns. I see my photos as infographics, more or less. Even if there are people in the photos, I see them less as portraits of the person and almost like the infographic showing what is behind the statistics.
Warzel: You traveled to almost every state over the course of a year. Often, you met these people at gun stores, and they allowed you into their homes and you interviewed them at length. I imagine you established relationships with these people that might even continue to this day. What surprised you during your reporting and shooting of the project?
Galimberti: First, there were some positive surprises. I was imagining only meeting a certain type of person—super-fanatic right-wing people. And so the good surprise was to meet nice people who invited me to dinner and on walks and for ice cream. It was surprising to learn that owning a gun does not mean you’re unstable and bad. Coming from Italy, we receive only bad news about guns. Nothing we see about guns is good. I’m not saying that there are good things about guns, by the way. But it was a surprise to see families that seemed so normal, living in normal neighborhoods.
The bad surprise for me was seeing how easy it was to find guns everywhere in the house. Most people said, “Oh, my guns are always locked in the safe.” But I didn’t always see that, to be honest. Quite a lot of times, guns were stored everywhere, and sometimes they were loaded and ready to shoot. And in some cases there were children around. In some instances, the parents were proud to show me that their 9-, 10-, or 11-year-olds were able to use the guns. For me, that was not normal to see. I don’t think a young person like that should be able to handle a gun, and yet I saw that happen many, many times.
But again, if I’m honest, it’s not easy for me to speak freely right now. Because these people gave me trust by letting me do the project. They trust that I’m not using the photos to speak badly of them. I have my personal opinion on many of the things I see, but it is hard to say what I think because these photos have gone super-viral. A few of the people I photographed have reached out to me, very angry. These photos are spreading across the world, and people are describing my subjects like deranged people, or suggesting these people are mass shooters. And they haven’t technically done anything wrong. They purchased these guns legally.
Warzel: One thing I’ve seen over the past week is people blaming gun-lobbying groups and organizations like the National Rifle Association and suggesting that this is the big roadblock to any progress on gun-violence prevention. But there is another argument I’ve seen a lot as well, which is that the bigger roadblock is a specific minority of gun owners who are fanatical and extremely well armed, who see their rights under constant attack, and who are threatening to act out should there be even the slightest change to gun laws in the U.S. Basically, the people who make this argument see the culture that you documented in your book and see a country held hostage by it. Since you are both an outside observer of American culture and also have spent so much time in this particular subculture, I wonder: Did this project make you more optimistic that something could ever change in the U.S. with regard to gun-violence prevention? Or has it made you more pessimistic?
Galimberti: Honestly, I’m a bit pessimistic. Because if Americans want to change something about the relationship you all have with guns, it’s not only a matter of regulation; it’s really a matter of culture change. And that cannot happen in a week or a month or a year. It’s not something a single president can do. It has to be probably numerous presidents, one after another, with legislation and culture changing piece by piece, very slowly. There are 90 million people who are really very armed in this country. And a big part of them would be ready to fight to protect those guns. And who wants to go against them? Even if you imagined real action from the government—if, for example, they offered to buy back guns from people, I think many of those gun owners would be ready to protest against or to fight that.
Really, I don’t even know what the right thing to do is. It’s not a question I can answer. Like I said, I don’t want to be some judge. But, if you’re asking me if I think it’s possible to change anything in a week? Absolutely, no. A year? Probably not. I think it is the kind of change that could take 50 years, because it’s a deep, cultural change.