Garrett Hansen doesn’t always use cameras to make photos. Sometimes he uses guns.

For his series The Void, Hansen took heavyweight black paper to a gun range and peppered it with 9 mm and .40-caliber bullets fired from various handguns from the likes of Glock and Beretta. Back in the darkroom, he loaded the paper into an enlarger and made prints by shining light through the holes.

"Guns are incredibly powerful and I was trying to come up with a visual language to describe that power," says Hansen, an assistant professor of photography at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

The shooting was done at a range in Lexington and another in nearby Nicholasville. Hansen worried range owners might object to a photography professor making an art project about gun culture, but found he was welcomed. "I was definitely nervous but I brought the work back to show them what I was doing and they were totally cool with it," he says.

To create the luminous halo effect, Hansen used a process called solarization. He exposed the bullet hole on translucent orthographic film instead of photo paper. As the print was in the developer tray he briefly flipped on the lights. This created the white outline while accentuating the jagged edge of each bullet hole.

The impenetrable blackness of the images leaves nothing but the place the bullet entered. Hansen references this in his title — The Void — and liked the emptiness of the photos. "It can be really hard to depict absence," he says.

Hansen hopes viewers are drawn in by the visual beauty and abstraction before they realize what they’re looking at. Otherwise, he worries people’s opinions about guns might color their reaction.

Guns are a divisive subject, but Hansen is focused not on guns, but our fascination with them in real life and in pop culture. The contrasty black and white images feel ominous, hinting at their potential for violence but also at their absence if guns laws change. "I hope there’s some tension in there," he says. "I wanted to create something that was attractive and terrifying simultaneously."