Over three years, Greg Gulbransen photographed Malik, a leader of the violent street gang the Crips. Malik was shot and paralysed by a rival gang member's bullet in 2018. As a result, his world centres on his small apartment in the Bronx, New York, where his family and fellow gang members care for him.
 
Gulbransen, a practising doctor, had been photographing in the Bronx in his spare time and had met some local young people. He began noticing many young men in wheelchairs with spinal injuries and became professionally curious. He was told that all had been injured in shootings involving rival gangs.
 
He wanted to speak to someone in a wheelchair and was introduced to Malik through a fellow Crip.
 
"As a doctor, it was a way of exploring one aspect of the epidemic of gun violence in this country. There are shootings every day across New York City's five boroughs, and the Bronx is the worst. But nationwide, gun violence and the availability of guns are a public-health emergency. The effects are devastating. The doctor in me wants to show people who do not live in areas with high rates of gun violence how terrible it can be in those places, how complicated the problem is and how far the effects of the gun-violence epidemic reach. The photographer in me tries to show what it is like to be a victim of gun violence while also being part of the problem."
 
 
 
One summer evening in 2018, Malik left his apartment to buy a sandwich for dinner. A rival gang shot him outside a 99-cent store. Bullets passed through his thoracic spine, instantly paralysing him from the chest down. Malik was one of the local group's key leaders, so even after the shooting, gang members continued visiting his apartment at all hours to talk, plan and care for their leader.
 
Malik lives with his mother and grandfather in a housing project. With no nurses or aides to help care for him, his mother, Eyanna, attends to his many medical needs during the day, including changing his diaper and catheter, while his father is on call at night. The photographs show Malik's daily life: the cramped apartment, the difficulty of inhabiting and navigating the small space in a wheelchair, visiting gang members, hushed conversations, his family's closeness and love, and the proximity of violence and loss.
 
"It is a very emotional space. There is tension, darkness and fear. It is a place of confusion. Yet at the same time there was always a great deal of love and care. The apartment was full of contradictions."
 
At the time of this account, Malik still could not enter certain neighbourhoods or travel along certain streets without a strong possibility that a rival gang member would try to kill him. His world is his bedroom. He is trapped.
 
"I am trying to complicate things for readers by showing them, I hope, that judging people like Malik may be morally harder than they think. There are many victims here, and yes, some are also perpetrators. I am certainly not saying these men are saints; they have all made choices and should absolutely be held accountable for them, but they are victims too."