"These photographs, this story, they are hard to deal with, yet one goes back to the pages, because we have the freedom to turn away from the tragedy, but the family and friends of Tyler Kobe Nichols do not. Their tributes are eloquent, as is the testimony in their faces. This is not black-on-black crime, this is the American way of death, as Ostrander's haunting work so powerfully tells us."
-Darryl Pinckney, author of High Cotton and Black Deutschland
A photographic elegy for one young man, one family, and one American death.
This book is an intimate portrait of grief, a chronicle that charts the devastation visited upon a large, multi-generational family in the wake of the senseless, random murder of twenty-one-year-old Tyler Kobe Nichols on December 23, 2020.
With the cooperation and full participation of the Nichols-Chambers family, photographer Spencer Ostrander was granted privileged access to the household. Over the course of the next several months, he conducted one-on-one interviews with each member of that household along with Tyler's closest friends and, in the natural light of those settings, compiled a large dossier of photographic portraits of each person involved in the story.
The result is an astonishing ensemble of pictures and words that pierces through the cold statistics we use to talk about the wave of street violence spreading across the country to focus on one person, one family, one lost life, and transform the numbers into vivid, aching human reality. The authors have entitled the book Long Live King Kobe in honor of the foundation that has been set up by Tyler Nichols's mother, Sherma Chambers, whose mission is to combat street violence with compassionate, peaceful initiatives and to offer support to the families of victims.
All proceeds from the book will be donated to her cause. You can learn more at longlivekingkobe.org.