Tamir

An article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that African-American boys as young as 10 years old were significantly less likely to be viewed as children than their white peers. The police officers in Cleveland who shot Tamir Rice said he was a black male who looked to be around 20 years old. He was 12. And he was playing with a toy gun.
This was one of the hardest portraits I’ve done. As I was working on trying to capture him, Tamir became every young boy I’ve watched grow up at the YMCA where I’ve worked for 14 years. It breaks my heart to know that his future was ripped away.