Guns make impactful photographs. The rage on the face of a youth pointing a gun at the camera in ‘Gun 1, New York’, 1954, by William Klein. Marc Riboud’s emblematic image of Jan Rose Kasmir, confronting the American National Guard outside the Pentagon during the 1967 anti-Vietnam march. ‘Saigon Execution’, 1968, by Eddie Adams. ‘Iranian Revolutionaries’, 1986, by Jean Gaumy. ‘The Falling Soldier’, 1936, by Robert Capa. I could go on and on.
Marcus Bleasdale’s photograph of a child soldier with the Mayi-Mayi militia, Kanyabayonga, Congo, 2008, hangs in my hallway. Tom Stoddart’s powerful picture of Meliha Varesanovic walking proudly and defiantly to work past an armed soldier during the siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia, 1995, hangs outside my daughter’s bedroom. A book that I regularly thumb for guidance on how…