Say Less

Over the course of three years, Greg Gulbransen photographed Malik, a set leader of the violent
street gang, the Crips. Malik was shot and paralysed in 2018 by the bullet from a rival gang, and as a
result his world now centres around his small Bronx apartment in New York, where he is cared for
by his family and fellow gang members.
Gulbransen, a practicing doctor, had been photographing in the Bronx during his spare time and
had got to know some of the local kids. He began to notice a lot of young men in wheelchairs with
spinal injuries and was professionally curious. He was told they had all been shot. He wanted to
speak to someone in a wheelchair and was introduced to Malik through a fellow Crip.
‘As a physician, it was a way to explore one facet of the epidemic of gun violence in this country.
There are shootings every day in the five boroughs of New York City and the Bronx is the worst.
But across the country, gun violence and the availability of guns is a public health emergency. The
effects are devastating. The physician in me wants to show people who don’t live in areas with high
rates of gun violence how terrible it can be in these places, how complicated the problem is, how
far-reaching the effects of the gun-violence epidemic are. The photographer in me is trying to
show what it’s like to be a victim of gun violence while also being a part of the problem.’