Jennifer Ray, interviewed by Conner Gordon

In today’s America, gun violence has become an indelible part of our landscape. It is an ever-present waterline, ebbing and flowing yet never disappearing entirely. It colors the everyday minutia of our lives as it expands its reach into schools, churches, movie theatres, and music festivals. It is the question unasked in our politics, as we collectively assume that nothing can be done to bridge our bitter divide.

Under such circumstances, taking a long look at the firearm in American society is difficult. There is always another tragedy, another flashpoint pulling our attention away. Yet Jennifer Ray’s In Range manages to hold our attention, imploring us to look deeply at the violence interwoven into our history and the tools used to carry it out. Since 2012, Ray has methodically photographed makeshift gun ranges littered along a 15-mile stretch of Wyoming highway. Transforming the desert into her studio, Ray isolates the shooters’ targets from the surrounding landscape and photographs them as sculptural forms. In doing so, Ray examines the larger forces informing the gun debate and illuminates the contradiction at the heart of America’s obsession with firearms: a deeply human thrill with an ever-rising cost.

CG: Fascinating. I’d love to talk about the objects in question that you found when you were out there. So, when I’m looking at these images and the objects depicted in them, I see this interesting duality in them. Some of them have a concrete sense of why–when you look at them, you know exactly why someone put them there and wanted to shoot at them. Things like the Polaroids, the human-shaped targets, and even the propane tanks to a certain extent.

That’s where I see one side of these photos, but I’m also fascinated and disturbed by the ones that seem very random. Like where someone shot up a couch, or beer bottles, things like that. Things that are very arbitrary, where people decide, “What’s going to happen if I put a bullet in this? Let’s find out.”

I’m really fascinated by this duality in this work, and I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit.

JR: To me, that’s really core. I didn’t grow up shooting guns, I think I shot a gun once, before I went out and went shooting with somebody after I started the project. I didn’t really grow up around guns, but I did grow up around fireworks. A favorite pastime amongst me and one of my friend groups in the summers in high school is we would go and blow up watermelons and cantaloupes, pretty much anything that seemed like it might explode if you put a firecracker in it. I think that, to me when I look at some of this stuff, while I look at it and I might feel a little bit horrified by the impact of the bullet, because it’s showing me what the bullet is meant to do, which is destroy, it’s also making me think about this really human and confusingly human desire that most of us have to destroy, and the pleasure in that. I think shooting is a really aesthetic experience, that there is a sense of pleasure and joy when you watch something explode.

I think, to me, getting at some of those kind of contradictions is at the heart of the work. It’s about asking a viewer to have a more complicated reaction to a subject matter they might have a very firm and unwavering perspective on. That’s where I come at it from my own personal experience, and also how I’m trying to use that duality as a tool.

CG: It makes me realize that that duality is so central to the debate around guns in the US. You have one side focusing on what the bullet’s meant to do, the destruction coming from it, but you’ve got this other side where, maybe because they grew up with it and it’s a communal tie, or just the aesthetic pleasure of taking a propane tank out to the yard and blowing it up. They’re two sides of the same coin, but it cuts to the core of why it’s so difficult to have a common language around guns.

JR: I grew up in North Carolina on the east coast, and so for me traveling out west has always felt kind of exotic. Now I live in Kansas, which is on the cusp of the West. I think, as opposed to the way that you see the construction of civilization in the eastern part of the country, when you go out west, it empties out so completely. I think that emptiness has a lot to do with the way that politics developed in those places, and the way that they continue. When I’m traveling out west a lot of times on these trips, I’m mostly camping. I think you have to have a lot of respect for the place that you’re in, because it can be a dangerous place. There are mountain lions out there, and in some places wolves, things that can eat you. You feel this opposition between the human and the land, which is something I never experienced growing up on the East Coast. It was the land I needed to protect, not something I needed to be protected from.

This area’s high desert, and I think it absolutely has something to do with why this part of the country is very libertarian. It’s these empty stretches of land where you’re taking care of yourself, where the land is pretty unforgiving. When I think about that as a corollary to the gun debate in the country, I think there’s definitely something there, in trying to understand why guns have such a different place in American culture than in any other culture around the world. We have insanely high rates of gun ownership and gun violence, and so to try and figure out why that is, I think we have to think about the formation of the country, and this kind of westward expansion that was really not all that long ago in terms of this bigger, historical sense of time.

That’s a really convoluted answer, it’s something I think about a lot because it’s not necessarily easy to connect the dots in a nice line. But I think there are these big historical reasons why the West developed in the way that it did, why politics there tend to be of a certain kind, and why that also really fosters gun culture.

JR: With this project and other projects preceding it, I made a conscious decision that I wasn’t interested in photographing the shooters. For me, the reasons for that are really straightforward, although it’s one of the most commonly asked questions I get. For me, when you photograph a person, you really change the conversation. I think a really skilled artist working with portraiture can make a portrait that goes beyond the surface, that goes beyond the demographic qualities of a person. But I thought with this project that, if I made pictures of the shooters, it was really going to reduce the project into something that would confirm or deny biases viewers might have. All the kind of demographic qualities, is this person male or female, black or white, rich or poor? Most of us have very rigid biases; particularly those of us who identify ourselves with being on the left have an idea of who shooters are. I think that can really limit the conversation if I’m only showing the shooters themselves.

As the project developed a bit more, that played a big role in why I didn’t want to photograph the shooters, because I think I can create a more empathetic conversation if I’m asking the viewer to look at and understand these objects, in a different way and a way that contradicts the things they imagine about the shooters themselves. It also gives the viewer a bit more space to imagine themselves in the scene. Like you’re talking about the Polaroids, and even if most of us haven’t gone around and shot up Polaroids of our ex, we’ve all felt like it. We’ve all been that angry, we can understand what that feels like. I want to encourage people to get in touch with those darker parts of themselves, particularly if they haven’t already had much exposure to gun culture.

JR: I think there are other questions about how I’m working with the things that I find. If I go and photograph these targets and these places without doing anything, if I step out of the car and take a photograph, a lot of the time the thing I see is not going to be legible in the photograph, because of the ways cameras work versus the way our eyes work when we move around a space. That initially played a part in why I decided to treat the objects as sculptures. I’m always photographing things that I find, in the places that I find them, but I’m pretty much always making adjustments to them. For me, those adjustments or staging sof the things that I find have become a much bigger part of the work. It’s definitely not something I intend to disguise in the work, but it’s very interesting to me to see what kind of reactions I have to that from different audiences.

I started the project in 2012, then didn’t really have a chance to work on it for five years, and picked it up again in 2017. I made a pretty big shift in the work when I picked it back up to really treat the things I was finding much more metaphorically. Thinking or being more assertive about the particular associations I wanted certain images to have

As an example, there’s a photo of four bottles that are hanging from a tree limb. This photo started because I saw one of the bottles hanging there, that somebody had been using as a target. This hanging bottle there seemed to have very easy-to-read connotations. I don’t think it has anything to do with that particular shooter and why they were shooting at the bottle. I don’t think they were thinking, “Oh, I’m going to make this noose, and I’m going to hang this bottle as one would hang a person.” That’s not it. But, to me, that was inspiration, and all of a sudden it got me thinking about these histories of violence in a country, both racial violence as well as old West-style vigilante justice, these are the kinds of associations I have with this.

I kind of hung up these other bottles I found in the area, which, who knows, maybe the shooter originally had multiple bottles up there. To me, that’s kind of beside the point. To me, in making this photograph, there’s both this documentation of something that’s actually going on, as well as an attempt to connect it to these much bigger histories that are outside of the facts of the situation. Things that, if any of my viewers think they are not complicit in this kind of violence, particularly white viewers, or haven’t benefited from that kind of violence in the past, they’re kidding themselves. To me, this is one of these points of connecting the dots in this complicated way, where it’s not a straight line from racialized violence to contemporary gun ownership or gun culture, but there’s a line, even if it’s a complicated and crooked line. There is one from point A to point B.

JR: I’m a professor, and this is something that comes up with my students, and with young artists who are trying to figure out why it makes sense or doesn’t make sense to do the things they are doing. Young artists in particular tend to have a lot of frustration, they want to fix a problem. They’re going to make some work, they’re going to do a thing, and the problem’s going to be all gone. And it just doesn’t work like that. For me, I’ve gotten really comfortable with the idea that I’m not going to be able to necessarily point to a particular outcome from the work. I definitely think it’s important for artists of all stripes, working in all media, to be looking at the world and engaging with what’s going on in the world. It’s the responsibility of artists to be aware of what’s happening in the world, to be educated on the cultural conversations that are happening. To me, there’s no way around that. That’s a fundamental part of what being a cultural creator is.

But I think when I have students who want this immediacy, they’re lacking the understanding of how culture works and changes. Nothing changes overnight, and it’s these big cultural conversations that slowly, but eventually, do drive things forward. Some great examples include the gay rights movement, which has been chugging along for decades, and it was in the 70s that the push for equal marriage rights started. That push didn’t succeed for decades, and in those intervening decades there were artists who were making work about those issues, there were TV shows addressing those issues, there were plays talking about those issues. I think it’s all of those forces working together that eventually succeed and create change.

CG: Absolutely. I think that covers the questions that I had, what else would you like to add?

JR: I could talk about this forever, but I’ve just been putting together a syllabus for a class I’m teaching on art and documentary. I’ve been rereading Martha Rosler’s essay on documentary photography. It addresses a lot of the things we’ve been talking about in interesting ways. She’s talking about The Bowery–she was doing this in the ‘60s and ‘70s–a neighborhood in New York known for being really run down, full of alcoholics and people using drugs, and also veterans suffering from PTSD, a lot of homeless people out on the streets. It also attracted a lot of documentary photographers, because it was like “Oh, this a window into the suffering of certain groups.” This essay she wrote, it’s a really important essay in documentary history, and she’s chastising these photographers and the viewers of that photography. You can imagine it, you don’t need to see it, it’s the stereotypical portraits of homeless people, half the time unconscious. She talks about how that kind of work makes the photographer feel good, they feel like they are doing their duty to address the problems of the world. It makes the viewer feel good, because it gives the viewer a sense of empathy. That viewer might even send money to a social cause, or write their senator. But she says it’s a really thin way of actually getting at the problem.

You’ll have to go look at the work she made in response. The way that she basically treated it, she photographed the spaces without the subjects there and paired it with these lists of words. They branch out a little bit from this, but generally are euphemisms from drunkenness. “Soused” would be an example. But then she starts using these words that are euphemisms, or maybe she’s turned them into euphemisms, that talk about cultural forces. Some of them are “shellacked,” to talk about these architectural terms that also mean to be drunk.

All of a sudden, you start seeing this work connecting to bigger cultural forces that make you think a little more deeply about the problem she’s addressing. It doesn’t give you this easy satisfaction of feeling sympathy for a person who looks like they’re in bad shape. It doesn’t alleviate the responsibility the viewer has, particularly an elite liberal viewer, for these systemic problems, often which benefit the same elite liberal people.

When I first encountered that essay, it made a lot of sense to me, it’s something I think about a lot, how we provoke a more complicated conversation that involves some greater degree of self-awareness from the viewer, and how those can maybe, in the long run, at least, create big systemic changes that actually solve the problem, rather than putting a band-aid on the problem and making us all feel better.