Remembering the Spectacle of Disaster after 9/11

The events of September 11, 2001, were characterized by an impressive degree of spectacle transmitted to a global audience via multiple media platforms. From the live televised impact of United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower to the toxic dust cloud enshrouding lower Manhattan and to the eventual militarized invasion of the Middle East in the years that followed, the excess imagery of 9/11 lingers in public memory and exerts its influence on visual culture.

In 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster, Thomas Stubblefield provides readers with an alternative examination of the events of 9/11 by investigating numerous visual works—photographs, graphic novels, books, films, and physical structures—that emerged after the disaster. He explores the tension between visibility and invisibility, the way visual mediums confront their destined symbolic death, how images are remembered in both public and private memory and spaces, and how the events of 9/11 helped the world acquire a vocabulary for reading ideas and concepts relating to disaster. In the process, he opens up innovative approaches to the study of 9/11 and visual culture.

How is a camera operator (analog or digital) interpellated to respond to disaster? Stubblefield reflects on how immediacy was fulfilled by the digital on 9/11, allowing photographers—and spectators—to record images and regard their indexical subjects at a later time. He borrows Susan Sontag's notion in On Photography that—as he puts it—the camera "effectively removes its operator intellectually and even emotionally from the reality before the lens" (30). This idea brings up questions about the representation of the subject/object captured in the shutter of a lens and how the distancing effect is activated when the photographer avoids a present moment of tragedy and disaster. Stubblefield references Martin Heidegger's argument that the world can be understood through an image and Guy Debord's statement that the world is now recognized as a representation (50). In taking these opposing views into consideration, Stubblefield highlights the tensions inherent in how spectators make sense of the world through photographs. For example, he explains that spectators favor the digital camera over the analog camera because the former yields easy access and circulation, whereas the latter leads to deferral (52). For spectators, making sense of the world (disaster and tragedy) must be immediate, and digital cameras mediate both the world as understood as an image and the world recognized and framed as a representation.

Stubblefield addresses various examples of post-9/11 art as a guide to assist readers in understanding how the language of disaster on 9/11 transformed the landscape of visual culture and how art made slight and careful references to the tragedy. This is not to say that Stubblefield neglects pre-9/11 events; in fact, he draws on aspects of New York City's past that captivated photographers. For example, he uses psychoanalysis to explore and complicate the phenomenon of falling bodies. Among other theories, he draws on Sigmund Freud's interpretation of falling bodies as a sensation felt in early childhood games of being tossed up in the air repeatedly and also on Jack London's notion of falling as a form of memory passed on through generations, in which the mode of survival of early primates depended on how they swung from tree to tree (50). Stubblefield seeks to explain why falling intrigues the human mind, comparing the now historically ingrained picture The Falling Man, photographed by Richard Drew, to the recent images of On the Beach by Richard Misrach. Stubblefield examines the interruption of formal diegetic space in Misrach's work, arguing that bodies that have washed ashore on the seemingly tranquil beach, in a dimensionless space, "mimic[] the trauma conveyed by the images of 'leapers'" on 9/11 (77). Stubblefield goes on to assert that the falling body becomes a myth that is framed to justify war as a way to avenge the deaths of...