Theory: September 2006 Archives
There's a great example of deep reading of a single image over at The Space Inbetween. Using a very early and uncharacteristic (to our minds, now) Diane Arbus photograph, it deals with the contextualization of images and how individual images impact our understanding of a larger group.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I worked about a mile north of the World Trade Center and watched from the middle of 5th Avenue as the north tower collapsed. It seems a small and insensitive thing to call out, but while I always carried a digital camera to work, the batteries were dead and I have no photographs from that day. I remember saying to a colleague after the first plane hit (and we were under the impression it was a small private plane) that I'd have many days to shoot that gaping whole as it'd take months to repair. Now, the camera has become my talisman - leaving home without one is an invitation to disaster.
In the Sept 3 Times, Garrison Keilor review's Watching the World Change, David Friend's meditation on photography's role in recording 9/11 and its aftermath. From the book:
As the morning crept on, New Yorkers poured into the streets, many to help, many in flight, all of them aghast. Out, too, came their cameras. Men and women by the hundreds, then thousands — bystanders with point-and-shoots, TV news teams, photojournalists by the score — felt compelled to snap history, fiery and cruel against the blue.
Keillor, as a writer, plays up the limitations of photography and a bit of disdain for the photographic impulse (and later, the commercial impulse to sell those images) but perhaps this is only a good counterbalance to Friend's cheerleadering for photography and its redemptive effects on memory. Maybe memory alone is not enough, yet there are some things about that day that some found just too much for photography's cold, eternal gaze. In any case, the act of putting the viewfinder to your eye amidst those events still seems an insensitive and self-absorbed response, but it was a necessary and good thing in many other ways. I'm guilty of a fascination with recording the event, too.
Particularly critical to our memory of what happened is the effort by Joel Meyerowitz to record the destruction and recovery efforts that started on Sept. 12th. After discovering that no photography was being allowed in the vicinity of Ground Zero (I ran into this several times over the course of the next few months.) In describing his impetus, Meterowitz says, "To me, no photographs meant no history." Now, putting aside the question of how we can understand history in pre-photographic times, it's a powerful project he undertook to catalog the clean-up effort, recorded in 8X10 negatives under the auspices of the Museum of the City of New York. The Guardian has a review...
