I can’t seem to find words eloquent enough to describe the emotions I felt a year and a day ago. Perhaps some of you can’t, either. But on that day, hundreds of people found something that could speak for them: They picked up a camera, be it film or digital, still or video, and allowed that device to capture what their eyes could not or would not believe. Photographs allow us to truly experience an event, while words are oftentimes confining when dealing with emotions, merely pointing to but never reaching the absolute pinnacle of human feeling. We can only express so much verbally; the rest lies within. Yet, aside from the relentless bombardment of video clips from NBC or CNN, the photographs that emerged from the public on that day became not only a candle of memorial, but also a collective band-aid.
For a little over two months, the Corcoran Gallery of Art will host the exhibit Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs. This exhibit is a collection of amateur and professional photographs taken on Sept. 11, 2001 at all of the areas of impact: the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon, and the final resting site of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. The photographs are displayed anonymously and without captions. They each stand alone as one individual entity as it was seen through the eyes of a specific photographer at that point in time.
The photographs vary in their subject matter. Some are at once graphic and therefore challenging to look at; such as stills of the World Trade Center collapse, or the following aftermath and rubble. Others, just as moving, are distanced from the immediate site. One in particular shows a young boy and girl hugging each other while atop a roof as the World Trade Centers burns in the background. Another is a landscape of New York City as the Trade Centers smoke, but this photograph’s red and green palette has been manipulated, evoking a surrealistic feeling, perhaps not unlike what many felt on that morning. There are also photographs of people: living, reacting and trying to understand. One in particular that stood out is that of a twenty-something punk rocker, tattoos covering his arms, with his head in his hands. His shirt reads, “I’ve gone to pieces.”
And it is in pieces that this exhibit first began. On Sept. 12, someone taped a single image of the Trade Towers onto a storefront in SoHo. Passersbys stopped to gaze and began to pass the word along. It became a place to gather as more pictures were added to the “collection.” It was then that the idea was born for a real collection. People began to deliver their own photographs and the collection now stands at over 5,500. Exhibits have opened in locations all over the United States such as San Diego, Tampa and Chicago; as well as in Zurich, London and Dublin, among others. Admission is free to all exhibits, and all proceeds from purchased photographs are donated to the Children’s Aid Society of New York Fund.
Here is New York allows us to experience the incidents of Sept. 11 through each others’ eyes and in doing so connects us to the anonymous photographer as well as society as a whole. We may not ever be able to fully discuss the events that occurred on that early September morning, but in our mind’s eyes we will always remember.
The Corcoran Museum is located at 1811 14th St., N.W.
