AFTER 9/11: PHOTOGRAPHY,THE DESTRUCTIVE SUBLIME,AND THE POSTMODERN ARCHIVE

Back in the 1880s, when the handheld camera made its appearance on the mass market, it was called, with a certain degree of fear and trembling, the "detective camera." This small box (bigger than anything you can buy today) could, it was feared, capture the unwary at virtually any moment in their daily lives and activities. It would take over a hundred years for these vague premonitions to be literally fulfilled, with the result that almost anything that happens in the twenty-first century is, one might say with little exaggeration, under surveillance. Cameras (especially digital cameras)—and the resulting images—are ubiquitous, multitudinous, and seamlessly assimilated into the mass media, the internet, and visual arts. Inevitably, our political knowledge and our collective memory function more and more within an epistemology of photography whose implications we have only just begun to explore. Especially since September 11, photography has occupied a new place in American and world culture, inflaming passion while at the same time providing a base of evidence regarding events that have defied our sense of reality. (Without the photographs, the abuses at Abu Ghraib would have been as readily denied as the abuses of the Koran were, at first, in Guantánamo.) Through the print media and the internet, photography has gone some way to claim, once again, its place alongside television, which had in the sixties and seventies pushed photojournalism to the side. In fact, not infrequently the content of the television medium has itself been still photography, most recently Saddam in his underwear. Shame, exposure, invasion of privacy, revelation, exhibitionism—the hidden camera at times seems to merge with reality TV in turning the back stages of life into the front stages.

At the same time, the most compelling icons of contemporary culture—not infrequently documenting the chaos of contemporary reality—are, in fact, photographs, and we must confront their power to hold and fix our attention through their fusion of beauty and horror. Documentary photographs make claims on our moral imaginations that are equal to their claims on the aesthetic order: while we traditionally associate the "beautiful" picture with the beautiful subject, in documentary it is more often the unbeautiful that is the subject, and at times the utterly horrific. How we frame these sometimes repugnant subjects is the question I want to consider, along with the way we assemble them into an archive that embodies, de facto, our collective memory and our understanding of reality. These are questions that have been with us for a long time, but they're given new urgency by the myriad photographic representations of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath.

The aesthetic claims of photography, from the modernist era to our own time, have been based on the peculiar synthesis of art and science that was articulated most cogently by Paul Strand in a 1922 essay called "Photography and the New God": the camera was, in the right hands, the perfect amalgam of imagination and representation, intuition and craft, in short an idealized model of our mastery of technology. As such, Strand argued, it was a counter-symbol to the God of the Machine, opposing the latter's indifferent and destructive materialism and the demands it made upon the body of the worker. Essential to Strand's argument was the aesthetic control the artist could exercise over the machine, an implicitly heroic power.

If we are now, in the twenty-first century, beyond the age of the machine and well into a digital age that is dominated by electronic media, then we are also, in some ways, beyond the age of the heroic photographer. And in these changed conditions for the production of visual imagery, we must inquire whether the place of the aesthetic has not also changed. I believe, in fact, that we are in the midst of such change, one that requires us to look at photography within a broader spectrum of visual culture, both in terms of the production of visual imagery and its consumption. Strand, in the modernist era, invoked an image of the photographer as the exemplary master of the machine. Let me propose an even more grandiose formulation for photography today (with apologies to Nicholas of Cusa and his conception of divinity), a formulation that seems appropriate to our mental habitation of the World Wide Web: Photography is "a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."

1.

To sharpen our sense of this contemporary condition, let's return briefly, and by way of contrast, to Paul Strand. Though placing photography within an empirical tradition, Strand's idealization of the camera in his 1922 essay was an act of Romantic assertion, and Alfred Stieglitz, the modernist photographer par excellence, was in Strand's formulation the embodiment of this heroic synthesis of scientist and artist. Stieglitz was an aesthete, no doubt, but he was also closely observing the modern city as it moved from horses to automobiles, from walk-ups to skyscrapers, from gaslight to electricity. And the Strand/Stieglitz amalgam of poet and empiricist, artist and scientist, has indeed been sustained in the work of succeeding generations of photographers as well—in the monumental labors of the documentary photographers of the 1930s (including Walker Evans), in the photojournalists of the forties and fifties (Eugene Smith, especially), and in the work of a multitude of more recent photographers.

Yet a paradox emerges during the 1930s in the work of Evans and the other social photographers, a tension between the aesthetic and the empirical that Strand had otherwise affirmed as a synthesis. The conflict, to put it simply, is between the attractive beauty of the photographic image and our dismay and revulsion at the awfulness of the subject being pictured. As Walter Benjamin put it in "The Author as Producer" (1934), photography cannot depict "a tenement house or a refuse heap without transfiguring it." Speaking about the movement embodied in the Neue Sachlichkeit—the New Objectivity—of Albert Renger-Patsch, Benjamin goes on to say, photography "has succeeded in transforming even abject poverty, by recording it in a fashionably perfected manner, into an object of enjoyment." Such conundrums were rarely expressed in the discourse of thirties photography in the United States, one exception being James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), where the mimetic fidelity—and cold impersonality—of Walker Evans's camera was a central preoccupation, if not obsession.

The contradiction between the aesthetic and the moral seemed to reach a crisis toward the end of World War II, when photographers entered the concentration camps and saw for the first time the reality of the horror that had until then not been widely visible, though certainly rumored. One British photographer, George Rodger, solved the dilemma by refusing to contaminate a sense of outrage with any aesthetic dimension. Rodger, who would become in 1947 one of the cofounders of Magnum, found himself at one point in the act of photographing a pile of corpses, "subconsciously arranging groups and bodies on the ground into artistic compositions in the viewfinder." (In fact, Rodger was not the first photographer to arrange corpses for the camera—Alexander Gardner had staged some of his most famous images as well in photographing the aftermath of Gettysburg, but it took scholars more than a hundred years to figure that out.) Rodger's realization that he was treating "this pitiful human flotsam as if it were some gigantic still-life" led to a paralyzing self-consciousness: aware of the grotesque contradiction between aesthetic requirements and his sense of moral outrage, he stopped taking pictures.[1] While few photographers have followed Rodger's example of extreme abstinence, many have had to solve the problem in one way or another, and of course we only have the results of those who continued to shoot, such as James Nachtwey and Sebastiao Salgado, perhaps the two finest documentary photographers of the last twenty-five years.

The same tension between the aesthetic privilege of the camera's gaze and the abject misery and horror being depicted is evident in their work. Both Nachtwey and Salgado have been committed, for the last twenty years at least, to portraying the chaotic and tragic dimensions of contemporary social and political reality on a global stage, and their work has been seen widely in a range of print media (including Time and the New York Times Magazine) as well as online. It is one thing to develop an aesthetic (however complex) in response to conditions of poverty, where the dignity of the subject could be sustained, as was the case with Evans. It is altogether different when confronted with the more extreme conditions of contemporary political, social, and economic reality, whose destruction of the human body—whether slowly through starvation or quickly through savage mutilation and murder—has been the persistent concern of Salgado. Nachtwey's subjects are, if anything, more extreme than Salgado's, and for the past twenty-five years or so he has been looking at the sufferings of disease (in his AIDS series) and at the ravages of war. In their portrayal of the endless cruelties inflicted by guerrillas or militia upon civilians, Nachtwey and Salgado leave us balanced between our repulsion at the subjects and our compulsion to look at them, however guiltily.

What word does one use to describe such images? "Beautiful" seems like a betrayal of the subject and purpose. How can we enjoy the privilege of beauty that is made out of other people's suffering? But where does the power of the image lie, if not in some "beauty," and Yeats's phrase, "a terrible beauty" (from "Easter 1916") is often invoked in this context. But really, we have no good word for the artful representation of outrageous calamity and unimaginable misfortune that is in no way ennobling.

2.

Returning now to the contemporary moment, the world post-September 11, 2001, the first thing to be said is that we have never seen anything like the events of that day. Structures as large as the World Trade Center have simply not ever been destroyed before in this manner, out of the blue, on a beautiful cloudless September day. The second thing is that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the carpet bombings of Dresden and other German cities at the end of World War II produced far more destruction, far more death, and in a way raise even more questions about the political and moral complexities of war. Yet our visual knowledge of the massive Dresden bombings especially, suppressed by Goebbels, has only surfaced more recently in Germany in the work of Jörg Friedrich (Fire and Places of Fire), where it has ignited controversies over the guilt and innocence of the perpetrators and the victims which have no connection with my own inquiry, except to draw this contrast: though not the most horrific event in history (it would be hard to decide that honor) the Trade Center became, it's safe to say, the most photographed and most viewed event in history. Far from suppressed, images of the disaster became instantly available in print media, television, and the internet, and eventually in books.

Many images were taken in the early moments of the attack, even images of the planes flying into the buildings, that capture the moment of penetration and the aftermath in a way that remind us of Harold Edgerton's early strobe photographs of bullets penetrating apples and light bulbs, but on a far different scale, creating (if we think of it) an oscillation between the extraordinary difference between these similar physical events.

The huge fireballs exploding from the sides of the building moments after were likewise photographed, now by hundreds who had had time to get their cameras. Clearly, the effect of the attack was to produce what we can only call "shock and awe" on the viewer, an effect visible in the many photographs of people watching the events, their mouths agape and covered by their hands, their eyes glazed in astonishment.

What, we might ask, is the "awe" component of "shock and awe"? I am trying to understand not the exaltation of Al Qaeda in the face of the destruction of human life; that is a simple (and despicable) matter of exaltation at the death of one's enemy, not unlike our own exaltation at the destruction of Baghdad. I am trying to understand remarks that were attributed to Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Hamburg press conference in 2001, when he reputedly said that the collapse of the towers was "the greatest work of art." The remarks were shocking because they suggested a stark separation between an aesthetic and a moral response, one that the world could not accept, when so bluntly stated. But in fact, Stockhausen's observations were erroneously reported by a newsman who, perhaps with malice aforethought, omitted the moral context, where Stockhausen had said that it was Lucifer's work and proof that the fallen angel, the ruler of hell, was still a live force in the world. British artist Damien Hirst was similarly quoted, as saying the destruction of the towers was "visually stunning," and then adding, by way of clarification and retraction: "I value human life."

Obviously we cannot look at the destruction of the towers as a work of art. We cannot view the process of their destruction, captured on video and in photographs, as somehow separate from the loss of innocent human life. (As we might view, for example, the destruction of a housing project, long since vacated; or the destruction of a bridge, slated for demolition.) Yet some of these images have a quality of aesthetic excitement that threatens our ethical response to the images, producing a kind of double vision that cannot easily be untangled.

David Nye distinguishes between the natural sublime and the technological sublime: in the former, we stand in awe before the greatness of nature, a manifestation of a power beyond the human; in the technological sublime, we stand in awe of the power of man's creation, whether huge skyscraper, bridge, dam, railway, airplane, rocket. The sublime overwhelms us with its "irresistible power, magnificence, complexity."[2]We might have stood before the World Trade Center—while it was still standing—and experienced something of the sublime, in awe of the sheer size and mass of the construction. Viewing the scene of destruction from a distance, as many photographs captured it, we are in the position of spectators at a scene of destruction whose scale reminds us of Thomas Cole's painting in the Course of Empire series: In addition to our horror at this scene and our imagination of the excruciating suffering, there is in the spectacle of the buildings collapsing, the smoke and dust inundating the atmosphere, elements of the technological sublime, or perhaps its inversion—what we might call the destructive sublime.

Such a term preserves a little, at least, of the immediacy of the event itself, yet it suggests as well an aesthetic frame of sorts, a container for the chaos that was the actual reality of the World Trade Center and its aftermath. Composing a picture of the ruins, photographers did in fact struggle to frame it within conventions of viewing in order to mitigate the horror. James Nachtwey's photographs for Time, for example, often looked out of windows or jagged glass apertures at the scene of destruction, thus providing a kind of sheltered vantage point for the viewer to stand. And he even, on occasion, converts images of defeat and disaster into symbols of hope and resistance, by incorporating the American flag waving amidst the ruins. Nachtwey's pictures draw us in, they are irresistible, and yet they feel muted, mediated, staged, too attractively packaged for the consumption of Time's millions of readers.

A different kind of packaging has befallen the work of Joel Meyerowitz, the celebrated photographer whose nearly eight thousand photographs documenting the aftermath have become the "official" version of the U.S. government. Oddly, there was no effort on the part of city, state, or federal government to document the disaster, and Meyerowitz inserted himself into the scene without authority initially, but with the help of the Museum of the City of New York. Meyerowitz won not only singular permission to photograph the entire rescue operations, but was also designated by Colin Powell as a "Cultural Ambassador" in conjunction with the exhibition of his images, After September 11: Images from Ground Zero, exported in sets of twenty-eight pictures to cities around the world. Not since The Family of Man, perhaps, has an exhibition had such broad circulation and been given so prominent a role in representing American ideology. And that, unfortunately, is the problem with After September 11: framed by the words of Powell and Bush, sponsored by the State Department, Meyerowitz's pictures lose their autonomy and are coerced into a national narrative typified by such affirmations as this one by Colin Powell: "Terrorism must be destroyed. . . . We will give it the energy, the time, the effort, the persistence, and the patience necessary to make that come true. That is President Bush's determined objective; it is certainly mine; and I know it is the objective of each and every person in this room, and of all Americans and freedom-loving people around the world." Of course no photograph is innocent of its context and none can claim a purity in meaning or intent, but what Walter Benjamin argued in "The Author as Producer" seems strikingly relevant to the issue at hand: "What we require of the photographer," he wrote, "is the ability to give his picture the caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary useful value."

3.

In the aftermath of 9/11 our collective public memory of that event continues to be shaped by the images that remain for us to contemplate. Yet two radically different approaches to the 9/11 archive have emerged in the years immediately after the event, and their contrasting significance has yet to be adequately defined. On the one hand stands the effort of the Library of Congress to constitute a collection called the September 11, 2001 Documentary Project; on the other hand is the assemblage known as Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs. These two different archival strategies embody the contestation of public memory that is tied up with the event and its lasting significance.

In the words of curator Jerry Adamson, the Library of Congress set out "to collect a broad range of pictorial images that both factually document and creatively interpret the terrible events of September 11, 2001. The division's goal was to build a visual archive that, spanning all collection formats, would, for posterity's sake, accurately represent the nature and scope of artistic expressions prompted by the terrorist attacks on America." The implicit narrative is a heroic and ennobling one: "Looking back, the Division's still-growing 9/11 archive is not unlike the great collection of Depression-era Farm Security Administration photographs that captured the strength and resilience of the American people in times of duress." Unlike the FSA project, however, which was a deliberate and painstaking survey of the whole of the United States, dominated by a consistent vision and purpose, the Library of Congress's September 11 archive is a diverse lot of stuff—graphic cartoons, drawings by kids, photographs of vigils, memorials, rally-for-your-country photography with plenty of flags; it also includes, like the folklore projects of the 1930s, a massive oral history effort that began immediately after 9/11 to record the "man on the street" response to the events.[3]

But how, assuming you are the Library of Congress, do you decide what to keep and what not to keep? That is a question that, implicitly at least, is answered by Adamson, in writing about the formation of the collection, when he observes that the curators learned to recognize certain recurring archetypes: "airplanes being flown into office buildings and the resulting fireballs; collapsing towers; storm clouds of pulverized concrete; ash-covered survivors; burned and twisted structural steel; and exhausted firemen and police." Beyond the discrimination of genres, Adamson writes, "Curators learned to make critical distinctions among the photographs, to identify qualities that made one picture more compelling than another and determine what constituted a truly iconic 9/11 image. Later, this initial review of published work provided the experience and confidence to make significant acquisitions among the many unpublished images the staff soon encountered." More than this we don't get from Adamson. What makes one image iconic and another one not? We can simply beg the question and say that the iconic image is the one chosen by the Library of Congress, but that doesn't take us very far.

Is it the right question, though?

A quite different approach to the whole issue is taken by the assemblage of photographs known as Here Is New York (the title of an E. B. White encomium to the city's improbable resilience). As the project's subtitle suggests—A Democracy of Photographs—this archive of imagery from the World Trade Center and its aftermath originated in a theory of total inclusion: rather than select outstanding, or "iconic" images, the creators invited "anyone and everyone" to submit their pictures, and they gathered work by amateurs and professionals for display in a Soho storefront, with pictures digitally scanned, printed, and hung on walls and clipped to wires strung across the gallery. Approximately three thousand photographers submitted more than five thousand pictures, which were seen in the first two months by upwards of a hundred thousand people. (Millions more have seen it online.) Here Is New York, like After 9/11, has toured widely in the United States and also abroad, with international showings mainly in Europe (Germany hosted at least four—in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Dresden, and Stuttgart). In addition, a book selection—one thousand of the five thousand submitted pictures—was published in 2003, not as a selection of the best photos, it was said, but simply a representative selection.

To the extent that there is an editorial hand in this archive, it is visible in the categorizations of images that are available for closer view on the website (http://hereisnewyork.org/), as organized in a drop-down menu, with any given image being classified in several different categories, depending on its subject. The image archive is structured initially at least as a chronological narrative, beginning with the World Trade Center as it was when standing (more than five hundred images, many of them aesthetically powerful), followed by Immediate Damage, then Collapse, then Ground Zero. That sequence is followed by portrait groups—Firemen, Policemen, Victims, Onlookers. Then a series of topics—Memorials, Missing, Flags, Helpers, Military, etc. Then a series of views from various angles—North, South, East, and West, and points in between. Then topics of a more reflective nature—e.g., Still-Life, Media, Protest, Messages, Cityscape. Then another set of topics, somewhat miscellaneous—Afghanistan, Towers of Light, Rescue Dogs, then a set of images from cities around the world reacting to 9/11 (for reasons not stated there are no pictures at all from France; Berlin sent thirteen), a set featuring funerals for the victims, and a scantily populated set—only three pictures total—of the dumping grounds for the building itself, as it came to rest in New Jersey's Fresh Kills.

This arrangement, while somewhat arbitrary, offers an aesthetic satisfaction in its totality that might have seemed all but impossible: it manages to encompass in a single frame, a website (or, a fortiori, in its book format), the utter chaos and destruction of 9/11. You might imagine that they've got everything conceivable in this gathering of images, but one subject is conspicuously absent: the jumpers, the people who chose to leave the building through the windows, rather than stay and be incinerated. (There is one such image in the book Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs [Scalo, 2002].) Not many such photographs were taken, I assume, but several, at least, were published on the front pages of newspapers worldwide immediately after the event and were, one assumes, destined to become iconic images. Yet they quickly disappeared after their initial exposure.

The image of people jumping from buildings of that height, plummeting in free fall to certain destruction, was irresistible from a news editor's perspective: the image reveals in its immediacy the awful dilemma of the moment preceding the jump—whether to stay and die inside or in some way exercise the one remaining choice left for a free life, to jump to death. Of course we won't know the degree to which this was a reflex, an escape from the unbearable heat inside; and we won't know the thoughts that accompanied the action. Little has been written about these images, but what has, has attempted to trace the identity of the jumpers (for we can't tell, really, who they are) and to imagine this last moment as the result of a willful decision. Do families want to think of their loved ones committing suicide at the moment, with the implication that they had given up all hope?[4] The difficulty the average viewer had with these images was immense, and the instantaneous response of the public to them, often on grounds that might seem strange (e.g., "invasion of privacy"), prompted the news media, in all formats, to withdraw them from publication.[5] But of all the images of the World Trade disaster, they dramatize the human dilemma most effectively, they personalize the meaning, they put a face or at least a body, to the human loss that is otherwise unrecognizable; and they offer in the image of that long moment (it would take about ten seconds to descend to earth from that height) a representation of human vulnerability, against the structures of the buildings, that is uncanny in its evocation of Icarus and may recall to mind Pieter Breughel's 1558 painting. More darkly, the forms of the figures falling in space have the grotesque shapes of the figures in a medieval Dance of Death.

Whatever may be missing from Here Is New York, the totality of what is present has an abundance that is overwhelming and deliberate. What we are presented with is, in fact, an alternative mode of photographic practice and history: not the great photographs of widely celebrated photographers, not the most "iconic" image, not a selection of "representative" images. Michael Shulan, who organized the effort with the help of many volunteers in and out of the Manhattan photography world, including the well-known documentary photographer Gilles Peress, deliberately eschewed the curatorial and editorial role, at least as traditionally understood. Instead, their effort was "to develop a new way of looking at and thinking about history, as well as a way of making sense of all of the images which continue to haunt us."

I am not sure how we can "make sense" of the totality of images given us, but maybe that's not the point. Instead, what has emerged from Here Is New York is a new aesthetic that encourages us to accept, in a way not traditionally a part of aesthetic experience, the uncertainty of meaning implicit in the collection. It also embodies a set of principles that are indeed revolutionary, in corresponding to the unique conditions of production implicit in 9/11 and to the conditions of the postmodern moment more generally, by going against at least six major canons of traditional photographic practice and exhibition.

• First, it is inclusive rather than exclusive. Accepting images without regard to iconicity, representativeness, artist, or seemingly any aesthetic criteria, the exhibition affirms an openness that goes beyond the modernist avant-garde, which had, after all, its boundaries. (Duchamp's famous urinal was rejected by the Independents' exhibition in New York in 1917, which otherwise had claimed an openness to all comers.)
• Second, it is antihierarchical. Photographs are not attributed to their makers, whether or not the photographers have names or reputations. Saying that an amateur's image is potentially as valuable, or as "good," as a professional's—an artist's—is likewise an implicitly radical premise that goes against all notions of hierarchy and achieved status.
• Third, it contradicts the modernist ethos of economy. Not less is more, but more is more. The volume of pictures resulting from the inclusiveness is part of the overall statement. More is more here, and there is a deliberate aesthetic principle of excess rather than economy, a Whitmanian aesthetic. If no single picture of the day's tragedy has emerged as definitively iconic, the attempt here is to defy the very principle of a single image. The aggregated images, the collective, the excess, is precisely the point, appropriate to a subject that in every conceivable way exceeded anyone's expectations and worst fears. Feeling overwhelmed is part of the point.
• Fourth: it is anti-mass media. It is a grassroots effort of volunteers and professionals that is inspired partly, at least, as an escape from the formulaic coverage of the mass media. As Shulan writes, "In order to come to grips with all of this imagery which was haunting us, it was essential, we thought, to reclaim it from the media and stare at it without flinching."[6]
• Fifth: it is against the art market. Images were displayed without frames, without glass, without curatorial imprimatur. All images for purchase are priced at the same figure, $25, a modest sum to begin with, and with proceeds going to a charity directly related to healing from the disaster. (More than thirty thousand have been sold.)
• Sixth: it is against the contemplative aesthetic in encouraging an active response in the world, thus moving the experience of viewing from the distance of aesthetic perception to the engaged activity of the respondent to disaster. It allows the viewer, in effect, to bypass the feeling of guilt and voyeurism that might otherwise overcome the experience, though still within a framework of consumption. Still, it permits a certain optimism even in the face of this disaster, letting the engaged viewer say: here, let me help a little, there is still a human community.

4.

The internet as a photographic archive opens up a virtual space that is almost infinite, and the vast collections now online are changing our access to visual imagery in ways unimagined just a decade ago. One more example of the new photographic praxis in documentary photography is the online exhibition operated by Pixel Press since 1999 (see www.pixelpress.org), founded by photo-editors and authors Fred Ritchin and Carole Naggar as a response to conditions governing the production, editorial control, dissemination, and consumption of documentary photography. Working with a range of human rights groups, non-governmental agencies, museums, and documentary photographers, Pixel Press has sought to defeat the numbing effects of the mass media by creating more provocative visual stories, sometimes by professional photographers, such as Salgado's series on the end of polio; and sometimes by amateurs, such as a series of images taken by Rwandan children, or a set of images by ordinary Iraqis, both showing us a side of their lives we would not otherwise see. Other stories combining photographs and texts deal with the lives of Hispanic Americans (in English and Spanish) and with genocide in Darfur. To witness another's devastation in this way, while obscene, is also necessary: obscene because of the disparity between our own experience as voyeurs and the extreme of pain that is the entirety of existence to the pictured subject, palpable confirmation of Georges Bataille's sense of the "infinite absurd" of animal suffering. But necessary, because without our knowledge, however remote, however attenuated or artificial, there is no possibility of compassion, which is the foreground to action: most of the Pixel stories allow the viewer to contribute to relevant causes, for the theory underwriting Pixel Press is that the internet and free media can be used not only to inform the privileged but to allow for active intervention.

Moving us from mere contemplation to action, however symbolic, Pixel reinforces the strategy of Here Is New York. Yet another anticipation of the aesthetic and moral ethos of Here Is New York—and Pixel—is the work of photographers like Jim Hubbard and Wendy Ewald, who have been, as part of their photographic practice, putting cameras into the hands of people who would more traditionally have been the subjects of the documentary photographer's lens (e.g., the homeless, the urban poor, the underclass of third-world countries, etc.). This work has been going on for a couple of decades, at least, and has dramatically enlarged our sense of who the photographer is, where the power of the gaze resides, and what the supposed victims can articulate of their own world when given the opportunity. And the resulting images, those published at least, can often hold their own with the work of professional photographers. What we have been learning—and Here Is New York dramatically reinforces the lesson—is that the medium of photography is renewing itself in a documentary practice that is expanding the definition of the aesthetic and erasing traditional boundaries of what's inside and outside the supposed sphere of art.

If photography is finding its way back into the center of the mass media, it is doing so in a way quite different from that of the previous century. From the thirties through the sixties, at least, still photography dominated the popular magazines, until it was displaced by the ubiquitous television screen. Photography's place now is as much on the internet as in any other medium, and the whole conception of the camera and its social and aesthetic functions is being transformed, given the ease of digital photography and editing. Photography within postmodern culture requires us to accept the messiness of blurred categories and ambiguities, of ambivalent responses, guilty pleasures, of wayward associations that push through our perceptions. It also, simultaneously, places us in the position of consumers of more distortion, more lies, "authorized" by the very same inclusiveness and "democracy" of the web. If you search for "WTC Remembered" on Google, the first website to come up is that of a patriotic family from Oregon, who visited the site of the towers some time after the events of September 11, 2001. The front page of the website declares in bold letters, "We Shall Never Forget," with a photograph of the cornerstone for Freedom Tower being laid on July 4, 2004; just below that image are two famous icons of the bedraggled Saddam Hussein, scratching his beard, with the caption, "12/13/03 Saddam Hussein Caught!" Not only does the page accept the link between Saddam and the destruction of the towers, it also suggests, with excitement, that at last we have found closure, the story has ended, we've triumphed as we said we would. We have much to give us reason for optimism in the postmodern culture of the internet, and also much to give us reason for concern.

Notes

1. See Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (Chicago, 1998), 88.

2. David Nye, American Technological Sublime (The MIT Press, 1996), 246.

3. Jerry Adamson, "The Image as Witness: Collecting Visual Materials from the National Tragedy," Library of Congress Information Bulletin, September 2002, http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0209/images.html. May 20, 2005.

4. See Tom Junod's essay in Esquire (September 2003), "The Falling Man," based on a photograph by Richard Drew, which was a finalist for several magazine awards.

5. In addition to the Drew image, available online, Bolivar Arellano has a few such images on his website, http://www.bolivararellanogallery.com/.

6. See (http://hereisnewyork.org/gallery/bookintro.asp)

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