Souvenirs From a Civilization That Kills Its Children

Photographs by Andres Gonzalez

In the halls of schools where students have learned about the archaeological remains of failed civilizations, they have unwittingly shed the wreckage of their own. The visual artist and author Andres Gonzalez spent six years dutifully photographing the debris of a society in a specific form of decline: the letters, cards, notes, mementos, keepsakes, toys, talismans, objects, and ephemera that accumulate following a school shooting. The artifacts pictured in the book American Origami, Gonzalez’s incredible collection of more than 700 such photographs and their stories, recount the process of our civilization coming undone—of us becoming people less sensitive, less noble, and more barbaric than we once were. Through scores of Gonzalez’s interviews, photographs, and ruminations, American Origami chronicles the rise of a dark cultural malignancy and recounts the way that it eventually defeated us, then visualizes the cost.

Gonzalez’s journey begins just as everything changed. When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attacked Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, they and their echt suburban faces became the pop-cultural manifestation of every anxiety the last millennium had about the one, notebooks, and , fantasizing, between hours spent on old-school , that they would eventually pay their ordinary Colorado community back for the combined crimes of—in their view—laughing too much and being pious. That is to say, they were proto-posters, the first sons of the nihilistic, lethally irony-poisoned moral cesspool of the internet about to be born. The two believed that they would be famous, that they would inspire more killings, and that they would have followers; they were correct on every count.