Michelle L Elmore YA Heard Me

I started visiting New Orleans barbershops on Friday afternoons. Many of the subjects in my monograph "Ya Heard Me" were Gangsta' Rap artists. I began documenting their day-to-day lifestyles in the neighborhoods they were from. In the two years leading up to Hurricane Katrina, I shot thousands of photographs of these young people. I realized the moniker "soldiers" by which they refer to themselves was not an affectation. The average life expectancy in this demographic is 25 years. They speak, live and interact with an urgency that I would imagine exists on battlefields. I have personally witnessed over 50 shootings. One day, one of my subjects was shot through the chest. The bullet passed through his body, missing both his heart and spine by fractions of an inch. Apparently, the slug was so hot that it cauterized the wound on the way through and it didn't bleed. He went home to lie down for a few hours and was back on the street the next day.