Sunday, July 14, 2013

Ammo Cross-sections

Wired:
You pull the trigger; the trigger releases the hammer; the hammer slaps the cartridge, and out the bullet fires. But what’s going on inside each of those cartridges? That’s what you can see here. “Ammo,” by Sabine Pearlman, is a series of photos of perfectly bisected projectiles. All have some sort of recognizable silhouette–either the short, stubby shape of a 9 mm cartridge, the chunky rectangular body of a shotgun shell, or the long menacing lines of higher-powered ammunition–but inside, we see, each has its own unique architecture.
Pearlman happened upon the cleaved ammo last autumn, when she was touring a Swiss military bunker set deep in a mountainside in the Alps. There were 900 different types of ammunition in all. “I instantly wanted to photograph them,” Pearlman says. She convinced the munitions expert there–the one who had actually cut the bullets in half–to let her document them, and returned shortly thereafter to see it through...At the bottom of each is a primer–the place where the hammer strikes the cartridge. Above that we find a chamber of propellant, in most cases gunpowder. Move up another step, however, and we start to see the range of the ammo manifest itself. Some of the cartridges carry simple slugs, others buckshot. Some are packed with tiny ball bearings; some have miniature, armor-piercing arrows sheathed inside.
Those are pretty awesome photos.

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