here is new york — a democracy of images
This book contains nearly a thousand
of the more than five thousand pictures that some three thousand photographers
submitted to the exhibition. It has not been edited to showcase the “best” or
the “strongest” images, but to give the most coherent sense of
the whole. here is new york has by now amassed one of the largest photographic
archives in world history devoted to a single event. But whereas after other
events of this magnitude one striking picture has sometimes come to stand for,
or to symbolize, what happened, the one picture which will probably come to
stand for the World Trade Center tragedy will be all of these pictures. What
was captured by these photographs — captured with every conceivable kind
of apparatus, from Leicas and digital Nikons to homemade pinhole cameras and
little plastic gizmos that schoolchildren wear on their wrists — is truly
astonishing: not only grief, and shock, and courage, but a beauty that is at
once infernal and profoundly uplifting. The pictures speak both to the horror
of what happened on 9.11 (and is still happening), and to the way it can and
must be countered by us all. They speak not with one voice, but with one purpose,
saying that to make sense of this terrifying new phase in our history we must
break down the barriers that divide us.
Link to images by Ken Schles on the here is new york web site (use the back button
on your browser to return to this site):
link 1 (link currently broken, see same image here.)
link 2
(link currently broken, see same image here.)
Several 9/11 images and an essay on the evolution of modern warefare can also be seen on this site as part of my series Homeland
Security, published in the Traces and Omens catalog for the Noorderlicht Festival exhibition of the same name.
Off-site link to
the here is new york web site.
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