Carlos Javier Ortiz’s We All We Got confronts youth violence in the United States through work made between 2006 and 2013. Its subject is not violence as an isolated event, but the damage that spreads through families and communities when children and young people are killed or placed at risk. Ortiz keeps those lives—and the relationships surrounding them—at the center of the book.

The photographs are joined by essays and letters from people directly affected by youth violence. This combination gives personal testimony an active role rather than asking images to carry the entire argument. The letters register experiences from within the crisis, while the essays widen the frame to consider the social conditions that permit such violence to persist. Across these different forms, the book seeks both intimacy and public accountability.

That structure distinguishes We All We Got from a narrowly observational documentary project. Ortiz’s photographs provide encounters with children and their families, but the accompanying texts resist reducing them to anonymous examples of suffering. Covering seven years, the work also establishes a sustained historical interval: its concern is a recurring American reality rather than a single episode or news cycle. The book’s significance lies in this movement between individual lives and collective responsibility.

Red Hook Editions published the first-edition hardcover in 2014. The 179-page volume uses black-and-white imagery in a horizontal 7½-by-9½-inch format. For a serious photobook collection, its value rests in the deliberate integration of photography, correspondence, and critical writing around a difficult civic subject. It preserves Ortiz’s extended engagement with youth violence in a form whose editorial construction is inseparable from its ethical position: those most affected are not merely pictured, but allowed to address the reader.