Although there are no official statistics, I can tell from experience that almost every American recognizes the events that took place on September the 11th 2001. Articles, documentaries, and textbooks help us remember the attacks against New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
In her essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag states, “Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about.” (261). So does society remember the attacks collectively by the picture of the World Trade Center being hit by a plane? The attacks harbored impressions so deep that at any moment most Americans, on being questioned about where they were when the towers were hit, will be able to answer with vivid description those everyday details otherwise forgotten or relegated to the background. Each person has a personal memory of the attacks, “individual and irreproducible dying with each person.” (261). “When the first plane hit I was at my desk, and like just about everyone else, I assumed it was an accident,”1 says New York construction worker Benjamin Levy, who witnessed the towers being hit by the planes. Others were not able to witness the attacks with their own eyes. Many have been cited as immediately feeling as if New York was attacked. Dawn Prince, a supermarket worker in the south recalls “some crazy…must have pushed the button somewhere and some kind of war has started.” 2 Many had not seen the footage of the attack. “I didn't believe them. C'mon, I mean what are the chances of a plane not seeing a huge towering building looming in front of it and then crashing into it?” 3
Sontag states that there can be no collective memory, but collective instruction. Society is ‘taught’ through dialogue and photography to perceive an event or person, and photographs when conjoined with a strong sense of personal emotion often give this learning a status of memory. What actually happens is an alteration of the personal memorscape; the members of society associate something personal in their lives with the more sweeping tragedy. Through this sort of associative remembrance collective memory extends into and influences personal memories. Interviews conducted on 9/11 as well as other American wars stand testimony to this transformation.
Only a third grade student when the attacks took place, I too can recall the day very vividly. The first picture I can see is of the speaker on the wall, where the unusually weakened voice of my principal came over the loudspeaker announcing indoor recess because of a swarm of bees on the playground. I came home to a picture on the television that remembered the death of pilot John Ogonowski whose plane had been overtaken and crashed into one of the towers. The screen was maroon, with a portrait of an esteemed pilot in the corner, a rolling white marquee of cursive white text honoring a national hero. Later that night, after my father told me about Osama bin Laden, I remember for the first time seeing the face of a villain. No crashes. No fire. What remained with me was a face that altered my memory of the day: the deflated voice of my principal, the picture on the television: all of it acquired meaning. Over my childhood and adolescent years, the media telecast of 9/11 and the news reports on the war in Iraq–the hunt for that face–continued to tweak my memories of the day. A reading of Sontag, and the photographs I researched, altered my personal memory of that tragic day, filling it with a previously absent sense of loss. This, to me, is a case of the fusion between the collective and the personal.
War causes displacement. And displacement both creates and disrupts history–a sentiment that Anne Michaels captures in her novel, “The Winter Vault”. When, Avery, the protagonist, builds a dam over the Nile, he displaces an entire village, relocates the centuries old temple of Aswan, and changes the ancient course of the river. His project is causing displacement, it is disrupting history, laments, Avery, for the history of humans is not the history of land, it is the history of water–civilizations in the past, Babylonian or Harappa, thrived along rivers. He adds6:
Each river has its own distinct recipe for water; its own chemical intimacies. Silt, animal waste, paint from the hulls of the boats, soil carried on skin and clothes and feathers, human spit, human hair…Looking out at the river, Avery was pained to imagine the force with which it would soon by bound…Each year, for thousands of years, swollen with waters from Ethiopia, the Nile offered her intense fertility to the desert. But now this ancient cycle would end…Instead there would be a massive reservoir reshaping the land…enough water would disappear into the air to have made fertile for farming more than two million acres…the (lost) silt, like the river, also had its own unique intimacies, a chemical wisdom that had been refining itself for millennia. To Avery, the Nile silt was like flesh, it held not only a history but a heredity. Like a species, it would never again be known on this earth.
Yet, that which is displaced survives and is remembered, through photographic accounts. Visual learning becomes the glue that unites societal perception of the attacks. “Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images,” Sontag states, “which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.” (259). In September 2006 the Huffington Post hosted a contest where anonymous writers shared their reactions upon visiting Ground Zero. One visitor from Australia writes, “Before this visit I couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of the situation… it was all images on TV, photos.” 5
Umberto Eco in an essay describes how the accounts of Baudolino–a 12th century historian who traveled through Europe in its dark ages–have been condemned to the status of lies. His accounts were words. But a photograph, in the finite space of four corners, freezes a moment into truth – there is no denying the evidence a photograph provides. This leads me to wonder: how did documentation and historical evidence change after photography was invented? What was it like before the first photograph? Words from Winter Vault come to mind7: “The earliest churches were just enclosed spaces…I think what really changed Christianity was when someone first put a chair in that space. People no longer felt the ground when they prayed.”
Like the chair Michaels talks of, photography placed a first visual motif on the act of record keeping. This at times has the effect of removing viewers from the “ground”, Ground Zero, or the other realities the photographs chooses to aesthetically capture. It is in both keeping the chair and a feel of the ground – the elevated beauty and the humbling reality – that a war photographs achieves its dual purpose, as Sontag says, of artistic beauty and documentation; it fulfills its goals of eliciting an emotional response and adding to the collective consciousness.
Joel Meyerowitz, acclaimed photographer, was granted rights to unrestricted documentation of Ground Zero, only days after the attacks took place. Meyerowitz was born in New York and practiced street photography while he was still in his growing stages as a photographer, both of which led to his interest in documenting ground zero after the attacks. One landscape7 he captured shows just a stream of a hose feebly attempting to extinguish the smoke from the wreckage. Rubble stacks as high as some of the surrounding buildings while heavy machinery works to remove it. Yet in the background a taller building still stands, reflecting the sun’s light. Common belief is that the city was shut down following the attacks, represented by the photo’s foreground. As Sontag says, “the site itself, the mass graveyard that had received the name Ground Zero, was of course anything but beautiful.” (258) Yet the background provides a light, a hope for the future of the city. Former assistant secretary of state Beers says, “We needed to depict not in words, but in pictures—the loss, the pain, but also the strength and resolve of New York, of Americans, of the world community to recover and rebuild on the site of the World Trade Center.”4
Another photo8 shows an aging New York firefighter, ash lining his helmet and sweatshirt while he stops from his grueling job to pose quickly for Meyerowitz. Despite the grim nature of his job, this particular firefighter manages to muster a smile. Cloudy are the man’s eyes, unsure of how to respond to the situation; he does not expect to photographed, nor does he expect to be considered a hero. The day this photo was taken was just another day at work for this particular firefighter. These pictures, as Meyerowitz describes, portrays the “physical, more human” side of Ground Zero. Sontag claims that “photographs tend to transform whatever their subject; and as an image something may be beautiful.” (258). Indeed, until the firefighter stares into his own eyes in this portrait, he may never realize his heroism for his contributions to Ground Zero.
Montage
Three photos9: a staircase leading to nowhere, rubble covered over the prints of office sandals, shoes, and galoshes; a wrecked desk, the back of a chair looking over a broken window into melting buildings, those papers strewn on the desk, symbols of a work started, left unfinished; a mother tickling her baby even as, across the Brooklyn bridge, the World Trade Center smokes its way down to the earth.
An epitaph to these photographs, words from Winter Vault8
How much of the earth is flesh?
This is not meant metaphorically. How many humans have been “committed to earth”? From the emergence of Homo Erectus…or from the elaborate graves…in New South Wales, interred forty thousand years ago...Shall we being to investigate from before the last ice age…or with Cro-Magnon man, a period from which we have inherited a wealth of archeological evidence but of course no statistical data. Or, for the sake of statistical “certainty” alone, shall we begin to count the dead from about two centuries ago, when the first census records were kept? Posed as a question, the problem is too elusive; perhaps it must remain a statement:
How much of the earth is flesh.
Bibliography
Text
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Other Words.
6-8: Michaels, Ann. Winter Vault. 2009, Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Interview snippets
1-3: Kelly, Alan. Levy, Benjamin. Prince, Dawn Gale. "Memories of 9/11." 2004. Barking Moonbat. Web. 10 October 2011.
4: Kennedy, Liam. “Photography as Cultural Diplomacy”. 21 March 2003. Wiley Online Library. Web. 10 October 2011
5: Anonymous. "9/11 Reactions." 10 September 2010. Huffington Post. Web. 10 October.
Photographs
7-8: Meyerowitz, Joel: “Aftermath: WTC Archive”.179-302. Web. Images. 2003-2006.
9: Time LightBox. “9/11: The Photographs That Moved Them Most”. 1-22. Web. Images. 8 September 2011.
