Too Young to Die












A war is underway in the United States today, with the nation’s youth suffering its most devastating consequences. It is an undeclared war, but it is as real and savage as any of the wars that claim the lives of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. The casualties of this war come from a thousand bloody battles being waged nightly on the neighborhood streets of cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, and Los Angeles. Some victims are gang members; some are elementary school children—innocent bystanders walking down the street or intended victims. This undeclared war stems from a long history of gang, drugs, poverty, despair and gun violence.
Too Young to Die, addresses the lingering wounds of conflict, which differs from declared wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere only in the conspicuous absence of formal recognition by the state and society. Too Young to Die seeks to redress this lack of recognition by illustrating the consequences of urban, often internecine, war.
One of the most important battlegrounds of this war occurs on school grounds. Going to school in the Chicago Public School system, I witnessed violence first hand and saw its impact on my community. I recall the discomfort of realizing how many students did not come back to school after summer break because they had been killed, wounded, or incarcerated as a result of gang activity. Today, both the perpetrators and the victims of these crimes have gotten younger. Tragically, on average, sixteen youth between the ages of 10 and 24 are killed in the United States every day as a result of gun violence (CDC, 2009). This is more than the number of American servicemen lost each year in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Chicago in 2010, nearly 700 children were struck by gunfire, an average of almost two a day. Sixty-six of these children died (NPR, 2010).
In addition to the tragedy of losing so many children to violent deaths, children and families who survive are left with the psychological burden witnessing violence. A recent study of a sample of Chicago high school and elementary students found that nearly 40 percent had witnessed a shooting, more than 33 percent had seen a stabbing, and 25 percent had seen a murder (Chicago’s Community Health Council). Tragically, these numbers have only grown in the intervening years. Studies strongly suggest that when young people live in neighborhoods plagued by violence, even if they are not primary victims of violence, they are considerably more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress, depression, and anxiety, and are more prone to behavioral problems and academic underachievement.
Too Young to Die is a long-term documentary photography project, now in its fifth year, which seeks to enlighten the public about the effects of youth violence on young victims, their families, and society as a whole. It is an effort to shake the country's conscience in a way that most mainstream media—hyper commercialized and celebrity obsessed—no longer do. My interest is to get beyond the headlines, beyond the fear and sensationalism, and create understanding of the true costs that are borne by the victims of this violence, and, in the final analysis, by all of us. The purpose of my project is to personalize the stories of youth, families, and individuals who live in the aftermath of violence. Although many survivors live in fear, their stories are also about hope, love and resilience.

Carlos Javier Ortiz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and raised in Chicago, Illinois. As a teenager, his love of photography led him to work at a traveling carnival to save money for photography equipment and college tuition. He studied photojournalism at Columbia College Chicago and became a staff photographer for Chicago In The Year 2000 (CITY 2000), a yearlong project documenting the city and its inhabitants. Since that time, Carlos Javier has focused on documenting society's most vulnerable communities across the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Israel and West Bank. As a result of his commitment to addressing social problems, Carlos Javier won the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Photography(2009) award for Too Young To Die, his multiyear, comprehensive examination of youth violence in the United States and Central America.
He was also a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography (2008). In 2010 Carlos accepted an invitation to become a contributing photographer for “Facing Change: Documenting America,” a non-profit collective of some of the nation’s best photographers and writers covering under-reported aspects of America’s most urgent issues. He has taught graduate photojournalism at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and has been a guest lecturer at numerous other colleges and universities. In 2011, Carlos Javier received the Open Society Institute Audience Engagement Grant for his continuing work on Too Young To Die.
Carlos Javier has also received the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowship for his coverage of youth violence as a public health issue (2012). Other grants
Too Young to Die Lesson Plan
The 10 images in this section explore the aftermath of violence in Chicago and Philadelphia as seen through the eyes of Carlos Javier Ortiz. To frame these photographs in terms of the Aftermath Project, Sara Terry introduces them by asking viewers to consider the following questions: “How do you memorialize violence in an urban setting when you are not making a statue to the person who went off to war? How do you remember the people who have been killed, the people who suffer? How do we identify the stories of those who are left behind? How is the violence perpetuated? How does imagery continue the cycle of violence?”
In viewing these images, it is also critical to recognize that the context of the violence is complicated; a cycle of violence should not be dismissed as endemic to a particular group or urban environment. It may be helpful to keep the following prompts in mind as you view and discuss the images:
• What story—or whose story—do these photographs tell? What would you like to ask the people pictured, and what might they say? What do you think the photographer wants us to do with these images? How might he want us to react?
• How do these images confront or counter media representations and stereotypes of urban youth?
• How can these images impact the way we talk about violence in our cities and among urban youth today?
• What does the title of this project, “Too Young to Die,” suggest to you in relation to the content of
these images?