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Technology and Culture 43.4 (2002) 771-776



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Photographing Devastation
Three New York Exhibits of 11 September 2001

Julie Wosk

[Figures]

The feelings of profound grief, alarm, and anxiety—and the scenes of unimaginable human and structural devastation—produced by the events of 11 September 2001 were reflected in three very different photographic exhibits held in Manhattan during the final months of 2001 and the early part of 2002. Though the images in the exhibits varied widely, in some ways all these photographers, amateur and professional, were struggling to achieve the same thing: bear witness to destruction and mayhem that could hardly be comprehended or emotionally borne. The diverse photographs, seen collectively, became a moving testimony to human suffering and survival—and to our capacity to use modern technologies to create architectural wonders as well as the catastrophic events of that day.

The three exhibits—one at the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side, two in gallery spaces in SoHo—shared some similar themes. 1 There were images of the World Trade Center towers before the attacks, celebratory images that were often unabashed tributes filled with deep affection and awe for those icons of architectural modernity—structures that reflected the optimistic belief in glass-and-steel rationalism and faith in the enduring elegance of pure geometric forms. The twin towers [End Page 771] looming at the tip of Manhattan were often photographed with two other national icons, the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge, in view—monuments to America's pride in its democratic ideals and its technological achievements. (No matter that even before their completion in 1976 the towers had also attracted criticism; the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, for example, wrote in 1973 that "The towers are pure technology, the lobbies are pure schmaltz" and dubbed the structures "the ultimate Disneyland fairytale blockbuster.")

These photographers of 11 September also presented technology in an unusual guise, in pained images of the buildings' devastation and its aftermath. Their photographs captured the moments when two airplanes—exemplars of technological ingenuity—destroyed the towers, those emblems of the twentieth century's pride in its technological expertise. At the entry to the New-York Historical Society's exhibit, New York September 11, a large-scale image by Steve McCurry presented a fearsome view of the huge explosion and the clouds of billowing smoke as the Center's north tower collapsed in a cataclysmic fall (fig. 1). [End Page 772]

The contrast between the ideal and the fearsome seen in these photographs echoes, on a much larger and more horrifying scale, some central technological images created by artists in the nineteenth century. By the 1880s and the 1890s, photographers and artists in Europe and America were celebrating the era's central engineering achievements: the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, steamships and railroads—achievements that were seen as testaments to human engineering genius and that held out the promise of social progress. Yet always coexisting with these celebrations were images of catastrophe, serious as well as satirical images of steam boiler explosions on railroads and steamships that fractured machines and sent hapless people flying through the air—the type of image created by British artist Hugh Hughes, for example, in his satirically titled 1831 etching, The Pleasures of the Rail-road: Shewing the Inconvenience of a Blow-Up (fig. 2).

The causes of these catastrophic nineteenth-century explosions were much studied and debated, and for the most part they were ascribed to human error and mechanical failure. These photographs of 11 September, however, are a grim reminder of the types of explosion produced not by error or malfunction but by malice.

Contradictory human impulses, and the opposing forces of technology, were reflected in all three Manhattan exhibits, but most tellingly at the New-York Historical Society exhibit. This exhibit presented the work of eighteen Magnum photographers, members of the prestigious agency of professional photojournalists who, coincidentally, were in town for an agency meeting on 10 September. The photos were organized into three [End Page 773] sections: the...

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