bullets

For his project "Shots Fired," photographer Mark Teiwes created images of gunshots. Instead of shooting the images with a camera, however, he shot the photo-sensitive paper with bullets.

In April of 1970 I was near Phu Tai, Vietnam in the 173rd Airborne Brigade Admin Compound. We were pissed off at taking Viet Cong sniper fire from the mountain above us several nights in a row. The guy would stand up from behind a rock and blow off a clip from his AK47 on full-auto. The sniper was shooting at such a high angle that most of his rounds came through the sheet metal roofs of our hooches. We decided to use a "heavy" response the next time(s) the sniper hit us.

For her project "The Big Bang", photographer Deborah Bay captured macro photographs of plexiglass sheets that had various types of firearms fired at them. After having professional law enforcement officers fire bullets into the glass, she brought the sheets into a studio and "shot" them again with a Contax 645 and a 120 macro lens. She writes,

I began thinking about "The Big Bang" after seeing a sales display of bullet-proof plexiglas that had projectiles embedded in it. The plexiglas captured the fragmentation of the bullets and provided a visual record of the energy released on impact. As I began to explore this concept further, I also was intrigued by the psychological tension created between the jewel-like beauty and the inherent destructiveness of the fragmented projectiles. Many of the images resemble exploding galaxies, and visions of intergalactic bling sublimate the horror of bullets meeting muscle and bone. In fact, Susan Sontag described the camera as "a sublimation of the gun" -- load, aim and shoot.

Used in New York back in 1938, this revolver camera was a Colt 38 with a tiny camera that …

Turns out those crazy high speed photography shots you see of bullets shattering things aren’t as difficult to achieve …