77 Minutes in Their Shoes includes long-term, community involvement with the victims' families and survivors devastated by the 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas at Robb Elementary, which took the lives of 19 students and 2 teachers. Since 2022, I have been fostering a relationship with the nonprofit Lives Robbed, formed by the families, to witness and understand the full impact of these massacres and the role of art in helping communities process grief, establish connection, and enact change.

77 Minutes in Their Shoes, serves as an extension of my socially engaged practice which surveys our exposure to gun violence in the USA through photography and installation. Thirteen of the twenty-one families chose to participate in the project. 77 Minutes in Their Shoes features twelve color photographs of the shoes the Uvalde children were wearing at the time of their deaths. A teacher's running weight vest, which closely resembles a bulletproof vest, was also included. The shoes and vest were photographed as a straightforward document and as evidence of this tragic event. The still-life photographs are paired with black and white photographs of the family holding the shoes and vest. These intimate portraits reveal the families' vulnerability, resiliency, anger, and hope for a better outcome through their participation in this project.

The Uvalde families titled the project 77 Minutes in Their Shoes, which references the horrors their children and the teachers endured at Robb Elementary. However, for me as an artist and mother of two young children, the project also encompasses the seventy-seven minutes each person within their community waited for news of loved ones. This event did not just impact the 21 lost lives but forever changed all those still living.

For a recent installation of 77 Minutes in Their Shoes, I chose to print the shoes and vest to scale and frame them in simple floating pine boxes. The children and teachers are never coming home. This is a fixed reality. The family portraits were also printed nearly life-size on sheer fabric resembling vertical banners. Audiences subtly moved the portraits as they navigated around the families before reaching a small room housing the photographs of the shoes and vest. Audiences were confronted again with these images as they exited the space. The threshold from safe to unsafe and citizen to survivor is growing smaller every day. These banner portraits serve as the ongoing faces of gun violence in America.

When looking at a body of photographic work, a couple of things are very important to me.

Is the work showing me something new or putting a new spin on something already familiar?
Does the work take me from being an observer to being immersed in the world the photographer creates?
Has the photographer utilized the ‘technology’ of photography to present their work in a consistent manner that makes sense for the subject?

I think the project, 77 Minutes in Their Shoes, does all the above and then some. The Uvalde school shooting is an event that still resonates; the loss and the frustration of what might have happened had things been done differently come immediately into focus when thinking about it. That comes through in this project, but the photographer puts the event and its aftermath, literally and figuratively stark relief, stripping away what we think we know and feel to allow us to enter this singularly focused environment of family and civic tragedy with fresh eyes.

Many of the projects I reviewed revealed a lack of connection between photographer, subject and technique. Why are some images toned ‘dark’ and others blown out? Why is their one black and white image while all the others are in color? Is the photographer able to use a range of photographic skills to create a consistent mood and give meaning to the choices they made behind the camera, in the darkroom or at their computer?

The Uvalde photographs answer these questions, even without the artist’s statement about the work; the black and white portraits contrasted with the colorful children’s shoes are appropriately jarring yet tender – the family’s have raw, very present emotions while the shoes, in color, are tenderly preserved in the present with life still in them. The pairings make sense at a gut level but also allow you to go deeper emotionally and intellectually.

77 Minutes in Their Shoes has left these images in my brain and in my heart. One can only hope that they help move the conversation about gun violence forward as well.

– Keith Jenkins • Vice President, Visuals and Music Strategy, NPR

I hope to create two versions of this project to accommodate unique sites. One version has already been created as seen in the additional file uploads in the work samples. This recent exhibition version included five, 8 foot by 43 inch vertical black and white dye sublimation triptychs on fabric and 12, 15x15 archival color pigment prints on Hahnemühle Baryta mounted on Dibond and framed in a floating pine frame and 1, 17x17 archival color pigment print on Hahnemühle Baryta mounted on Dibond and framed in a floating pine frame. The second version of the project will exist as diptychs sized at 28 x 14 inches framed in either the pine frame, but with museum plexiglass for protection or a white minimal frame with museum plexiglass. The diptychs will be a combination of one half color for the shoes and the other half black and white for the portraits.