Please Make It Stop
Someone's Child Was Killed Here

Balloons and signs to most would symbolize a celebration, a graduation or an anniversary. On Chicago streets these days more often than not they are a sign of  a memorial.

These images are my attempt to record and remember those who have had their lives cut short before they have even begun to become the person we will never get to know. Each photo and name represents a Chicago Public school student who has been killed since Easter of 2009.

This is a project I do not want to continue.

In fact I have almost stopped on more than one occasion. Then one day I was speaking with a man who I had been working with on a different project. I told him what I was doing and that I didn't know if I could continue. He asked me," Do you remember the woman who was killed in the van with her nine year old son?" I did remember it because it was such a grisly story. They had been shot and burned up. The police thought they had been alive when the van was set on fire. They never found out who did it. It was an awful story.  I told him, "I remember."

"Well," he said. "That was my daughter and grand-son. You have to do this project."
 
The project gives me nightmares. I would be more than happy not to go to yet another homicide site and make a photograph. I hate it.

Yet what I would hate more is to not try and do something. The statistics are numbing and when we become numb we fail to act.
        Sarah Hoskins

 " We do not need military battles to provide images of conflicts."

                          Walker Evans

 
 

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War, Dying/death, Youth, Gangs/violence/gun control, Chicago, violence, Derrion Albert, student killings, South Side, shootings, high school violence

Sarah Hoskins

www.sarahhoskins.com

shoskinsphoto@sbcglobal.net