London-based photographer Zed Nelson does not shy away from conflict controversy or crisis. One of his most important works to date is "Gun Nation" The project; completed over a three-year period, has been published internationally in newspapers and magazines, was screened on British television, and has won four major photojournalism awards:

1999 Nikon [UK] Press Awards: Best Photo Essay
1999 Alfred Eisenstaedt Awards [Life Magazine/Columbia]: First Prize; "Journalistic Impact"
1998 Perpignan International Festival of Photojournalism: Visa d'Or; "Best Magazine Feature"
1998 World Press Photo Competition: First Prize; "Daily Life"

Other stories covered by Zed Nelson include: Cambodian elections; war in Angola,
Afghanistan, Somalia and El Salvador; modem-day Cuba; the French Foreign Legion; and the Ku Klux Klan. His portraiture includes Fidel Castro, Margaret Thatcher and Mick Jagger. Nelson's work regularly appears in TIME and Life magazines. The [London] Observer Magazine, The Sunday [London] Times Magazine, GQ, and others.

Zed Nelson is a graduate of London's Westminster University. A freelance photojournalist for the past 10 years, he is represented by IPG [London] and Matrix [New York]. Nelson's work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and at Visa Pour I'lmage, the International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France. The "Gun Nation" photo exhibit was recently displayed at New York City's Newseum.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S STATEMENT (2000)
Four years ago a man entered a British elementary school and shot dead 16 children and their teacher, triggering a fierce backlash against guns and calls for all privately owned firearms to be banned outright in the DEL. While arguments for and against guns raged in Britain; I decided to focus on America — a country that has historically embraced and celebrated gun ownership — a nation where a reported 40 percent of all households keep at least one gun.

Since 1960, over half a million people have been shot to death in the streets and homes of the United States, By no coincidence, there are an estimated 200 million guns in circulation nationwide. The solution seemed simple: get rid of guns.

Armed with this notion, I arrived at the NRA's 125th annual convention in Dallas on April 19,1996 and unwittingly stepped into a hornet's nest. "Guns don't kill people — people kill people" was the mantra I heard time and again from gun supporters, who usually added, "A gun is an inanimate object."

In the first year of this project, over 34,000 people were shot to death with inanimate objects. A sizeable proportion of vocal Americans are so passionate about gun ownership that they will admit no link between the proliferation and availability of firearms and the huge annual death toll.

Many guns owners, however, purchase guns as protection from a perceived threat, not just for the fun of it. A group of Memphis housewives warned me: "If you ban guns, the bad guys will still have them," and a father, holding a gun in one hand and his baby girl in the other, voiced a widely-held belief when he said, "It's my constitutional right to own a gun, to protect myself and my family." While this rationale seems reasonable, evidence suggests that the bad guys tend to steal their guns from the good guys (or just buy them second-hand), and protecting one's family becomes increasingly difficult when 18-years-olds can purchase semiautomatic weapons through classified ads and local gun shows, and children can readily get their hands on their father's guns.

In the last two years of this project, a series of fatal school shootings, committed by students with a variety of firearms, shook the nation. In the wake of the most recent and worst atrocity, the Columbine High School massacre, the need for gun control seemed obvious.Yet a local Colorado Congressman bizarrely announced, "Now is not the time to debate gun control," a view echoed by a Denver newspaper columnist who argued, "There is something profoundly distasteful about debating gun policy... in the context of the shock and mourning following such a tragedy." Rev. Lucia Guzman, director of the Colorado Council of Churches, was a rare voice of reason when she spoke out, "If not here...where? And if not now...when?"