Long Live King Kobe: Following the Murder of Tyler Nichols Set for May 10 Release
“This engrossing book reminds us how often such stories are ignored or overlooked. A loss so inexplicable might be forgotten by all but those who knew Tyler Kobe Nichols without these images and testimonies. The empty living rooms, barber’s chairs and neighborhood corners are filled with his presence. He is alive in the lives he touched. He is alive in us. I keep thinking about the condolence card from his mother’s co-workers. We people who did not know him have a chance to know him here. Our sympathies become commemorations; our prayers become praise songs. We are given the gift of witness.” —Terrance Hayes, Poet
Long Live King Kobe: Following the Murder of Tyler Nichols
Powerful Book of Portrait Photography Documenting One Family’s Grief and Loss from Senseless Street Violence
Set for May 10, 2022 Release
Authored by Spencer Ostrander, Paul Auster, and Sherma Chambers
Newly created Long Live King Kobe Foundation aims to prevent street violence through compassionate and peaceful community events.
Book Jacket
MARCH 15, 2022 (Brooklyn, NY) — On December 23, 2020, twenty-one-year-old Tyler Kobe Nichols was randomly murdered in a knife attack after getting a haircut just blocks away from his family’s Brooklyn home. “It was a weird and senseless crime,” renowned writer/author Paul Auster writes. “A sudden, unprovoked burst of violence, on a tranquil street in a tranquil Brooklyn neighborhood on the eve of Christmas Eve.” Like so many acts of violence in America, Tyler’s murder went practically unnoticed, eliciting just two paragraphs in the Daily News—and that was it. But it altered his family forever.
Photographer Spencer Ostrander was documenting the locations of mass shootings for a book he was working on with Paul Auster when he visited a funeral home and learned about Tyler’s murder. Though Tyler wasn’t killed with a gun, his mother, Sherma Chambers, and Ostrander connected immediately. In collaboration with the Nichols-Chambers family, they forged a new project. Chambers invited Ostrander to document Tyler’s murder and the void it had created in his family. Over the next several months, Ostrander conducted interviews with each member of Tyler’s household and his closest friends. In the natural light of those settings, he assembled a collection of photographic portraits of each person involved in the story.
The work that emerged, Long Live King Kobe: Following the Murder of Tyler Nichols, documents one family’s grief in order to give shape to the human faces devastated by violence. With Auster’s deliberately spare, unsentimental text that effaces the sensationalism of crime reporting, Long Live King Kobe re-sensitizes us to the extreme violence to which America has become inured. “Every day on local news there are stories of shootings and stabbings. The next day—what happens to those people’s families?” says Kareem Eusebe, Tyler’s cousin. In Ostrander’s photos, the fragments of trauma aren’t made to disappear. They are rearranged into a celebration of life. “The goal of Long Live King Kobe is to open up a portal of healing and to bring light to as many people as possible.”
Long Live King Kobe builds on the work of the Nichols-Chambers family, which has launched a community-driven foundation of the same name. The Long Live King Kobe Foundation (LLKK) aims to prevent street violence through compassionate and peaceful initiatives and to support families who have suffered from similar tragedies. In a recent series of healing sessions, the LLKK Foundation has brought together mothers and brothers who’ve lost loved ones to violence and has given them recognition and support that city courts and counselors so often fail to provide. As one mother who attended a healing session told News 12 Brooklyn, “These mothers are my strength. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to be standing here right now speaking to you.”
“My vision is to open a community center,” says Chambers. “So that someone who experiences this kind of trauma can speak to someone who’s going through the same thing and heal.”
All proceeds from the book will be donated to the Long Live Kobe foundation. You can learn more at longlivekingkobe.org.
About The Creators:
Paul Auster is the author of seventeen novels, five works of autobiography, four screenplays, and several collections of essays and poems. His most recent books are Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (2021) and the novel 4321 (2017), which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
Sherma Chambers was born on the Island of St. Vincent. She immigrated to the United States at the age of 15 and has lived in Brooklyn ever since. Chambers is the mother of three sons, Shomari (29), Shayne (24), and Tyler, who was murdered at age 21 on December 23, 2020. Following Tyler’s death, she became the founder and director of Long Live King Kobe, a New York State nonprofit organization. The goals of LLKK are to support the families and friends of victims of violence and to fund outreach programs for troubled youth.
Spencer Ostrander was born in in Seattle in 1984 and has lived in New York City for the past two decades. He has done extensive work in all forms of photography and has recently completed two other book projects that will be published next year: Bloodbath Nation, with a long text on American gun violence by Paul Auster and Times Square in the Rain.
ISBN: 9781736309322
$40.00 | 978-1-7363093-2-2
Jacket design by Bonnie Briant
Cover photograph by Spencer Ostrander
www.zebooks.com
“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
“How can we do justice to a gentle, openhearted 21-year old who was violently, randomly murdered? How can the particulars of his life and character outlast the horror of his death? Photographs often seize on extremities: the ugly evidence of the crime, the uncontainable grief of friends and family. What Spencer Ostrander gives us instead is a quiet space where each mourner thinks and remembers, confronts and yields to loss, hour by hour and day by day. Here is the evidence of things seen, known, and loved: Tyler’s playground basketball hoop; Tyler’s face tattooed on the arms of family and friends; the red barbershop chair where he got his last haircut; the memorial candles glowing softly; a cousin touching a picture frame as if his hand could bestow life on Tyler’s image. Death imposes solitude on every mourner—we each bear the burden of loss alone. And yet, as we turn the pages of this quietly powerful book, we also feel the collective sorrow of this family. Their closeness. Their valor in accepting the burdens and range of grief. Ostrander does not let us presume. He lets us honor their mourning with empathic respect.” —Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and author of Negroland
