Requiem - capturing the september 11th terrorist attacks through photography - Illustration

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2002

* For a few days following September 11, while a city desperately searched itself for signs of life, the missing thousands were made to inhabit New York's streets and parks assigns, as digital photographic images. Wanted: Dead or Alive.

* GEOFFREY BATCHEN teaches the history of photography at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

It arrived without warning, slamming into the side of the building and exploding on impact. A fireball ensued, incinerating those caught within. Dozens of civilians died that day, June 26, 1993, among them Layla al-Altar, artist and Director General of Iraq's National Center for the Arts. She was killed by one of the twenty-three American cruise missiles that had been fired more or less arbitrarily into Baghdad, destroying or maiming anything that stood in their path. Nothing was achieved by all this death and destruction of course, nothing but a chilling reminder to all that the United States government remains one of the world's leading purveyors of terror. Not that we needed a lot of reminding. Building and targeting nuclear weapons, violently overthrowing elected governments, exporting torture techniques to repressive regimes, assassinating selected foreign leaders, mounting economic blockades on perceived miscreants, sending in the bombers to kill from afar; these have been the hallmarks of United State s foreign policy during the American Century. Terror begets terror; it's just taken a while for the American continent itself to feel the effects of an inevitable return.

In the Arabic world, graves are often marked by a photograph of the deceased held aloft on a thin metal pole, a veritable forest of images of death. Those of us living in New York have witnessed a sudden flowering of such forests. Union Square, for example, was for several weeks the focus of spontaneous efforts to visually manifest a city's need to mourn its dead. The fences that surround the Square's gardens gradually became densely papered with thousands of home-made Missing Person posters. Testifying to the omnipresence of computers and color laser printers, the posters inevitably consisted of a photographic portrait, usually but not always taken from a snapshot image, together with text in black and red telling us the person's name and physical characteristics (height, weight, hair color, eye color, age, scars or tattoos, clothing last seen in, etc). These posters were everywhere in those first few days--in every downtown telephone booth, on the walls of subway stops, outside police and fire-stations, in the streets. It was, along with the massed candles, flowers and other tributes that often accompanied them, a new and very moving type of public art. Like me, many passers-by stopped to read the posters in detail, as if to ritually acknowledge the life recorded there, as if by reading closely we were doing something concrete to help.

Initially these posters were disseminated by the families of loved ones in case their missing spouse/friend/workmate had been found in the wreckage of the twin towers and was lying, unconscious and unrecognized, in some, as-yet-unchecked hospital bed. But as the days went by and no further victims were found alive, the word "Missing" became a terrible euphemism for "Dead" and the posters went from being ciphers of identity and pleas for life to cries of despair and poignant memorials for the departed.

The form of these posters deserves further comment. They were remarkably consistent in design, with their makers, working as if on autopilot, deciding en masse to adopt the look and character of the identity card. One is reminded of the warnings about this genre in the work of john Tagg, who has associated its interests with those of the state and described the image surrounded by identifying text as an analog for the criminal enclosed by the walls of his or her cell. Now this image-cell had become the equivalent of a tomb or coffin, and the identifying information a marker of someone's love for and intimacy with the body of another. All sorts of painful ironies were evident. The careful details of the missing body (a description of a hidden scar or of a wedding ring on someone's third finger of the left hand) read like a coroner's report, made all the more powerful by the contrast with smiling faces taken on happier occasions. Sometimes there was more than one photograph, as if a multitude of images was more likely to bring the person back. More painful irony still: in a few cases the maker had broken the missing person's body into segments, highlighting scars and other distinctive physical features but also visually reiterating the probable fate of this same body. We who saw the buildings burn and fall, we who daily breathed in the particulate smoke of New York's funeral pyre, we also now breathed in these images, absorbing them through eyes that had already seen far too much death.

Photography was everywhere in those first few days. The world saw just what we saw, the endless television replays of planes turned into readymade missiles crashing over and over again into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Soon CBS and CNN stopped playing that footage and replaced it with monochrome still images, as if to displace the painful perennial present of moving footage with the more comfortable 'having-been-there' of the static photograph. Other images quickly appeared in the news magazines, showing dazed and dust-covered business people rushing from the scene, coated in a grey-blue pallor, and official portraits of newly-anointed heroes, firefighters and police officers. And then there were the pictures of Ground Zero itself, a vast and stark inferno landscape of blackened rubble, a blank spot that told you everything and nothing. An open-call exhibition of photographs in Soho, titled "Here Is New York," showed them all, and more. Pinned on every surface of its two rooms, even hung from su spended string above one's head, were hundreds of documentary pictures taken by both professionals and amateurs during that first week. One of them showed Lower Manhattan blanketed in paper debris; this installation repeated something of that experience. The rooms were packed with solemn visitors, anxious to buy a print (photography as nothing but reproductions) but shuffling quietly as befits a graveside visit. And yet the exhibition also demonstrated that no one image could capture the September 11 experience adequately; hence the need for this dense collage, this chaotic fragmentation of memory, this ruins of an exhibition.