Follow the gun

To be completely honest, I had no clue exactly what was going to happen out there in the field. All I knew was that I was following the man with the gun. And he was moving fast.

By the time William waved his pistol in the air and called to me, “Let’s go,” the day had been long already.

It was up at 6. Caffeine and a cold breakfast. Boxes of snacks. Cans of soft drinks. Even coconut water. Actors. And bags of ice that began sweating bullets the instant I walked them through the supermarket doors.

There was the 45-minute drive to Breaux Bridge. And the nine hours in the south Louisiana sun shooting a short film I barely had the time and the money to be making.

Now this.

I’d never videotaped anyone shooting anything before. My own experience with a finger on the trigger was sincerely limited. I was 11. Summer camp in east Texas Scant instruction from my Aggie counselor. A pellet rifle and a big blue target I know I never grazed even once.

So now, with nothing but an iPhone between my face and the firing line, I stood back. Way back.

William had glued a roadmap of metro Dallas and three playing cards—the Jack of Hearts was near the center, stretching between Garland and Plano—to a wooden board.

A warm gust blew a tuft of his hair straight up as he leaned the massive thing against a stack of hay, limbs and dry brush in the middle of the pecan farm. ? I started recording, and he wrapped his left arm around the back of his head and began to fire—five shots from his Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver.

Crack, crack, crack, crack, crack!

My ears rang for an hour.

“We’re done,” he said simply. “Now, let’s shoot rounds.”

On Nov. 23, Baton Rouge artist William Greiner’s Leaving Love Field, his JFK assassination-themed art collection nearly three years in the making, debuted at Dallas’ acclaimed PDNB Gallery. It runs through Jan. 4. ? You can see one of Greiner’s photos from the show on page 114.

The shooting I had witnessed was the final stroke on “Jack,” just one of the pieces in the expansive exhibit that includes mixed-media work, his photographic tracing of Kennedy’s steps through Dallas on that fateful trip 50 years ago—a shadow falling across the sign for the Parkland Emergency Room, a graffiti artist’s “BANG!” tag on a fence in Dealey Plaza—and even a 22-minute audio collage serving as a surreal haunt of voices, music and vintage sounds that thrust the chaos of a bygone national tragedy into the midst of a new, vivid experience for observers young enough to be awestruck and those old enough to remember exactly where they were when they heard the news.

Evoking the shock of sudden loss and the ache of unstoppable violence each one of us has experienced in this life, or will, Greiner’s work is a reminder of the specific power of imagery to wrest us from the slumber of our immediate surroundings, to slide us into a new wedge of the human experience, to feel. It is my hope that this photography-themed issue of 225 does the same.

“President Kennedy left Love Field twice on November 22, 1963,” Greiner says. “This work serves as a road map of memory, loss, progress and remembrance.”