These vibrant, bigger-than-life portraits turn gun death statistics into indelible stories

Christine Spolar | (TNS) KFF Health News

PHILADELPHIA — Zarinah Lomax is an uncommon documentarian of our times. She has designed dresses from yellow crime-scene tape and styled jackets with hand-painted demands like “Don’t Shoot” in purple, black, and gold script. Every few months, she hauls dozens of portraits of Philadelphians — vibrant, bold, bigger-than-life faces — to pop-up galleries to raise an alarm about gun violence in her hometown and America.

In a storage unit, Lomax has a thousand canvasses...