Ralph Ziman estimates he was 13 or 14 years old the first time he had a gun pulled on him in anger. It was the mid 1970s, and he was with friends outside a shopping mall in the northern suburbs of his hometown of Johannesburg, South Africa. Someone may have looked the wrong way at a stranger’s girlfriend – his memory is fuzzy. What isn’t fuzzy is the sight of that stranger pointing a .45 Magnum in their direction.
Luckily the situation de-escalated, and everyone walked away that day. But Ziman estimates by the time he was 50 he’d had a gun pulled on him 15 to 20 times. “I have to consider myself really lucky,” he said. Unsurprisingly, he said he’s “always been very anti-gun.”
Ziman is a commercial photographer and filmmaker-turned-artist who resides in Los Angeles today. For over a decade he has made weapons the focus of his work, using tens of millions of hand-threaded beads to turn artifacts of war into artworks.
“I want to talk about the proliferation of weapons around the world and the militarization of police forces,” he explained.
His series “Weapons of Mass Production” recently concluded with Ziman’s most ambitious work to date: an entire fighter jet.
