Weapons are designed to injure, defeat, or destroy. Whatever their core purpose may be, weapons considered as objects - as examples of industrial design and as products – retain their cultural charge but are revealed also as aesthetically compelling commodities. There is something absolute about them and something secret also; they hold weight, embodying an undeniable intensity. A powerful unease accompanies this assertion, raising questions worthy of photographic inquiry.

The weapons I have chosen to depict - nuclear bombs, drones and guns - each have their own unique and seductive properties. They are icons of the post-modern military-industrial corporate complex and are highly relevant to America’s 20th and 21st century identity. Perhaps in the future, these artifacts will be emblematic of a cultural zenith or, as the great stone Moai of Easter Island, they may serve as a sober testament, as emblems of a culture brought to collapse by its own hubris and recklessness.

The photographic treatment documents these weapons as cultural artifacts, as specimens in a historical, ideological and economic taxonomy. Shot on large format and presented as large prints – often vastly larger than life – these dark artifacts take on monumental and monolithic proportions. This approach highlights the fetishistic nature of the forms, framing them as status symbols in the ultimate expression of hierarchal power. By employing the seductive visual language of luxury branding, I examine the ‘beauty’ of a killing machine.