I try very hard to avoid just repeating what you can and may read elsewhere but this is something I had to highlight. Photographer Kyle Cassidy has released “preview photos”:http://www.armedamerica.org/index.html from an upcoming book entitled “Armed in America: Portraits of gun owners in their homes.” They are, in a word, stunning. The American fetish for firearms is something I never understood and though I’m probably no closer now than before, these pictures moved me to place myself a little closer to those I’d always feared.
The thing that really surprised me is how very normally-American all these people look. Often pictured with their little children or pets in suburban living rooms, these are no gun nuts. And yet, for a lot of the subjects, toting an assault rifle looks just as natural as a TV remote.

This online exhibition has acted to further solidify my love for portraiture. There’s something so intrinsically human about looking at another person without pretension and in their own milieu. A few weeks ago I blogged about another portrait series that’s also an internet-photography must-see featuring gangsters in New Guinea and militant Palestinians. Check that out “here”:http://duenos.net/article/23/the-human-face-of-violence