Full exposure
by Katie Ponzi ’06, M’07

icture a happy family of four—mom, dad, little girl and baby—sitting on their couch, smiling at the camera. Beside them are an AK-47 rifle and two pistols, a .380-caliber Bersa and a .45-caliber Ruger. Seem a bit unconventional?

If you flip through the pages of Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes, the newest book by Kyle Cassidy ’96, you may think the other pictures even stranger. And you may find yourself asking, “Why do these people own guns?”

That’s the question Cassidy was determined to answer.

“I was at a party, talking to a former presidential campaign staffer—one of his jobs was to help his candidate appeal to ‘the gun vote’—and he told me that half of all the households in America had guns in them. I was pretty intrigued by that,” said Cassidy.

So he traveled 15,000 miles over two years to photograph his favorite subject—people—and to answer that question. And Cassidy found a range of answers including protection, the Second Amendment, a hobby and the intrigue of a gun’s mechanical workings.

Cassidy explained that he developed his passion for photography when he was young.

“My grandfather gave me a camera when I was about twelve. And there were always episodes of TV shows with someone like Carl Kolchak [“The Night Stalker”] in the darkroom, developing film that proved who the killer was. The whole thing seemed like something I really wanted to be part of,” he said.

Cassidy said he first learned to develop film at Rowan. “Watching that print go from nothing to something in the developing tray was amazing.”

An English major, Cassidy involved himself in several activities including Venue, Avant and The Whit—in which he published his first photo on the front page. “That [student publications] was really the first opportunity I had to surround myself completely with creative people, which has made all the difference in my life,” Cassidy said.

His creativity has led him to other projects including his most recent ones, in which he photographs veterans’ tattoos and people who own rocking chairs. “There are always a million things rattling around in [my] head.”

Cassidy not only learns more about the subjects he photographs but also learns more about himself.

In fact, after finishing Armed America, he made an interesting discovery.

“When it was all said and done, I realized that the strange person was me. I realized how little I’d known about America starting off, how little of it I’d seen and how insular my own life had been. And that in the grand scheme of things, most everyone in the book was more ‘normal’ than I was.”