"Portraits of Grief": Telling Details and the Testimony of Trauma

In the summer of 2002, Times Books published a volume containing the 1,910 "Portraits of Grief" that appeared in the New York Times between September 15 and December 31, 2001. The 1,910 stories that readers had consumed in the newspaper along with their daily breakfast or their morning commute were now compiled into a manageable archive and filed in alphabetical order. Rescued from the ephemera of the daily paper and the fluctuations of the internet, the portraits finally came to rest between hard covers.¹ In the prefatory material to the volume, editors and reporters characterize the work they did in creating this popular and much remarked on journalism. Their commentary both describes how the genre came into being—as a direct response to the flyers that had materialized along with the news reports—and provides a frame through which the portraits should be viewed.

Almost immediately after the disaster, the frantic search for survivors took the form of flyers identifying the missing. These homemade artifacts were hurriedly pasted onto walls, mailboxes, lampposts, and phone booths, papering the walls of bus shelters and train stations. In addition to often detailed physical descriptions, the flyers typically included photographs of the loved ones, almost always smiling. As the hope of finding survivors faded, the distinction between the missing and the dead began to blur. It is no doubt for this reason that as of the second day of reporting, the original title of the series, "Among the Missing," with its implicit hope of recovery, disappeared, to become "Portraits of Grief." Given their spontaneous and multiple origins, the flyers varied widely in size, style, and presentation. The newsprint portraits were of necessity uniform. As in a high school yearbook, everyone memorialized was given equal space and equal treatment.

How could readers be made to care daily about the individual dead who, unlike the subjects of traditional New York Times obituaries, were neither eminent nor glamorous? At the one-month anniversary of the profiles, an editorial titled "Among the Missing" analyzed the newspaper's attempts to master the civilian trauma. Faced with the massive numbers of victims, the editors pondered the best strategy for identifying the singularity of each life within the constraints of the form: "Each profile is only a snapshot, a single still frame lifted from the unrecountable complexity of a lived life." On the first day of reporting the losses, the metaphor of photography had also figured—recalling the effect of the flyers: "Snapshots of Their Lives, With Family and at Work" ran the headline (15 Sep. 2001, A11).

In the introduction to the volume, Janny Scott, the reporter chiefly responsible for the profiles in the earliest coverage, makes explicit the connection between the portraits and the flyers, the verbal and the visual. "We began," she explains,

dialing the phone numbers on the flyers. What we wanted were stories, anecdotes, tiny but telling details that seemed to reveal something true and essential about how each person lived. [. . .] The profiles [. . .] were closer to snapshots—concise, impressionistic, their power at least as much emotional as intellectual. And they were utterly democratic. (ix)

Scott continues to make the analogy to the visual medium as she looks for a metaphor to render the vast undertaking. "Like a panoramic photograph, the project gathered everyone it could and attempted to bring each onefleetingly into focus" (ix). Howell Raines, then executive editor, also embraces the discourse of photography in his foreword to the volume: "I'm convinced," he explains, "that the core of the portraits' appeal lies in our metropolitan desk's decision to cast these stories as snapshots of lives interruptedas they were being actively lived, rather than in the traditional obituary form." Most of the people who died would not have been the subjects of the traditional obituaries, he observes, a "powerful storytelling format in itself...