Sunrise/Sunset by Bryan Thomas

Issue 131

In the wake of the tragedy in Parkland, Florida, the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School courageously reinvigorated the debate about gun control in the United States. Often lost in the aftermath of mass shooting events however is the stubborn
fact that everyday gun violence still accounts for the majority of gun-related deaths in the United States and no segment of the US population feels this more than African American communities across the country.

According to the CDC, although African Americans only make up 14 percent of the US population, they account for 57 percent of gun homicide victims. For African American men, ages 15 to 34, there is no cause of death more likely than one that involves a gun. In her 2015 New York Times article, “The Condition of Black Life is Mourning,” the poet Claudia Rankine starkly commented, “Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black.”

Nowhere is Rankine’s “condition of black life” more represented than in the custom t-shirt shops of cities such as Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Miami. In shops across the country, the “Rest in Peace” shirt—custom-made, memorial t-shirts celebrating the life of those lost to gun violence—is a staple of daily life. Beneath beautified pictures of brothers, sisters, daughters, and sons, the words “Sunrise” and “Sunset” alongside the date of a birth and a death, memorialize a life cut short while giving new life to a revolutionary form of objection, worn daily for years to come, of the circumstances that lead to that life’s end; an everlasting symbol fighting against America’s structural impulse to misrepresent and, sometimes, entirely forget African American lives lost to guns.

“Sunrise/Sunset” is an ongoing portrait-based body of work that visualizes the phenomenon of “Rest in Peace” t-shirts as a means
of exploring the disproportionate toll and lingering effects of gun violence on African American communities in the United States. Through the documentation of the shops that produce these shirts, portraits of customers who’ve purchased them, and still lives of the t-shirts themselves, "Sunrise/Sunset" seeks to examine the ways in which a community unduly effected by gun violence processes grief through protest. Just two weeks after the Parkland shooting, Emma Gonzalez wrote: "Those who face gun violence on a level that we have only just glimpsed from our gated communities have never had their voices heard the way that we have in these few weeks." These shirts are that voice; a voice that tells us gun violence isn’t a singular event that disappears as fast as a scrolling news chyron but an accumulation of events that shapes communities in profound and unexpected ways; ways that, once they are seen, must not be ignored.

Bryan Thomas lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
To view more of Bryan’s work, please visit his website.