How did the book Bloodbath Nation come about?
My son-in-law, the photographer Spencer Ostrander, came to me one day very upset about the gun violence he was seeing all around him – as a decent human being would be. He said he’d decided to start travelling around the country, photographing the sites of all the mass shootings in the past 20 years. As I say in the book, mass shootings account for just a small fraction of American gun deaths, but they nevertheless occur with stunning frequency – roughly one per day over the course of any given year. Spencer made a series of long-distance excursions over the course of two-and-a-half years and finally took pictures of 30 to 40 places. When he showed them to me, I said: ‘“I think these are very, very compelling photos, and maybe if you put them together as some kind of book, I could write a text to go with it.” It was just an idea at that point and as it evolved, it became a kind of dialogue between us – the word man and the picture man.
