- Hardcover: 208 pages
- Publisher: KP Books (6 Aug 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0896895432
- ISBN-13: 978-0896895430
- Product Dimensions: 31 x 23.4 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 432,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
As the 2004 Presidential Election was beginning to take shape, Kyle Cassidy took note of the important role the simple concept of gun ownership was playing. Hardly anyone he knew didn't have an opinion in the debate over owning guns. Why was a constitutionally protected right so heavily debated, and who exactly are these folks that own guns? "I began to wonder who these seventy or so million Americans were, how they lived and what was important to them. I set out to photograph as many gun owners as I could and ask them one question: "Why do you own a gun."" Cassidy traveled some 20,000 miles, crisscrossing the country to meet with gun owners in their homes. Cassidy's photo essays create a powerful, thought provoking and sometimes startling view of gun ownership in the U.S. These "everyman" portraits, and the accompanying views of gun owners, fashion a riveting and provocative hardcover book. "I made two decisions early on," Cassidy says in his Introduction to the book. "First that I would photograph anyone who was willing, owned a gun, and whom I could physically get to. Secondly, I decided I wouldn't treat these subjects any differently than I would if I were photographing "Lottery Winners" or "Cancer Survivors" - I didn't want to rely on the crutch of controversy to prop my images up. I wanted a good portrait first." "As far as I could tell, there were no politically neutral books about gun owners - they all seemed to be propaganda, one way or the other. My job wasn't to make gun owners look good, or to spin something one way or another it was to take a series of interesting portraits".
About the Author
Kyle Cassidy is a photographer living in Philadelphia.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gun-totin' folk and a few pets,
By
This review is from: Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes (Hardcover)
Kyle Cassidy got the inspiration for this fascinating book while at his vet's looking through a copy of `Hunting Dogs: a Photographic Tribute'. If Krause could publish that then they might publish his book, which was just an idea at that stage. I was very pleasantly surprised when I first flipped through it because the publishers are known for mostly doing books for collectors and hobbyists which don't have the same design criteria as art photo titles. The book looks the part with one large photo on each right-hand page, printed with 175 screen on matt art paper.As other reviewers have noted Cassidy pushes no point-of-view with his photos and this, I think, is one of the strengths of the book. Here are average folk in their homes with their pets, books, furniture and guns. I doubt that the photos would have quite the same impact if they were taken outdoors, while the owners were hunting or at a target range because the interiors reflect the personalities of each person and this contributes another strength: these photos are a snapshot of how many Americans lived at the start of a new century. The photos are taken in a no-nonsense style: no fancy angles, soft-focus or other techniques because it's just not necessary. The people and their homes have enough visual pull to grab you as the pages are turned and a nice extra, on each page facing the photo, are their views on firearms. Another neat idea, in so many of the photos, was to include family pets and Cassidy seems to have captured them as relaxed as their owners. With 198 impressive colour photos I thought Armed America worked as a perfect photo book and it could turn out to be a classic as the years go by.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not just another coffee table book full of beautiful photographs,
By
This review is from: Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes (Hardcover)
Armed America is a remarkable book full of brilliant pictures, but it's not just the photos that make it so. Author/Photographer Kyle Cassidy has managed to put a human face on the numbers of American gun owners in this extraordinary book, and to his credit he has not slanted the work toward either side of the volatile issue of private gun ownership in the USA.The photos exhibit Cassidy's skill in capturing the character of his subjects, and his decision to restrict the text to the names of the individuals, the makes and models of the firearms in the photos--and most importantly the reason why these people own those firearms--has turned what could have been merely an interesting coffee table book into a significant piece of work that will take the reader a long way toward understanding this puzzling facet of the American psyche. Neither Pro, nor Anti Gun, "Armed America" is an outstanding piece of work that lets the reader decide for themselves, and as such this book stands as a shining example of what happens when good journalism meets true art.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A completely unbiased book of skilled portraiture...,
By
This review is from: Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes (Hardcover)
Cassidy has achieved his aim of taking a series of completely beautiful and skilled portraits of a wildly diverse group of American people in their homes with their firearms. This book is no different that a study of Americans and their automobiles. Firearms are inert objects just like anything else.Alas, guns have a perceived 'evil aura' and 'mystique' about them that usually prevents people who are prone to emotional outbursts and hard-line, close-minded political stances from simply seeing them for what they are. They also forget that vehicles kill tens of thousands more than firearms each year. His book is about photography, plain and simple, and he succeeds wildly. If the reader can be rational and intelligent and step away from the knee-jerk reaction to 'big, bad, scary guns' for a moment, they will discover a very compelling look at a human cross section of a complex and varied country, the United States. Brits are quick to dismiss firearms ownership as silly at best, and downright dangerous at worst. English culture is different in many ways, with private firearms ownership having been curtailed by the government all along the way. Now Brits, unfortunately, need only look to the radically-rising violent crime figures recently supplied by Scotland Yard's own record-keeping... not so different from the US after all. Cassidy's lovely tabletop book deserves to be rated as a triumphant and adept book of photographic portraits, not as the scary, 'Yank Gun Porn' book some make it out to be. He boldly tackled a very loaded topic in this book, but with the unbiased eye of the neutral shutterbug, or photojournalist, and not that of a politically-minded, heavily-slanted sensationalist. Highly recommended.
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