By David FriendPicador
Afterward, still in shock, everyone commented on it: the vivid blueness of the sky, not a cloud in sight, how exquisitely beautiful the light was that morning. Almost as if the weather should have been the perfect metaphor for what the future held...
In David Friend’s compelling and movingly written examination of the photographic legacy of the terror-filled day of September 11th, the light is a protean character—bordering on the mystical. As it happened, precisely because the light was fantastic, photographers (amateur and professional) were out en masse on the city streets. Unwittingly, they found themselves in a unique position to record history as it unfolded when the first fireball exploded and then the second and then the gray-black smoking clouds roiled above blotting out the sun and later, when the choking dust clouds raced below through the streets of downtown Manhattan.
It is striking to learn how many amateur photographs made it into the major newspapers and magazines. To be in the wrong place at the right time and get the tragic poetic angle was everything. More striking still, to learn how many of these people kept shooting at their own peril. More than a few said they felt as if God was with them, and they were merely an instrument. An office worker named John Labriola, descending the north tower with camera in hand, took the famous shot of firefighter Mike Kehoe as he climbed hauling seventy-five pounds of equipment to face his fate head on. The power of this image, known iconically as The Firefighter in the Stairwell, is that in one split second it tells a story: here is a young, heroic first responder climbing up the stairs to his certain death. (I learned that Kehoe actually made it out of the tower alive and unharmed. This picture now represents all first-responders who risked their lives to come to the aid of others on that day.)
Friend, Vanity Fair’s editor of creative development and formerly Life’s director of photography, looks through the lens at the gripping back stories of how some images came to be: a professional photographer who shot the north tower within minutes of the first plane’s attack through her apartment window until she decided to race down seventeen flights of stairs, hop into an ambulance and help set up triage at Chelsea Piers; a printing plant account manager emerging from the subway in time to shoot a harrowing sequence of the south tower’s collapse; a photographer who turns away from the carnage and shoots the expressions on the faces of New Yorkers as they gaze upward in horror; a freelance photographer who is killed in the collapse of the south tower, but his camera holding over three hundred images is recovered intact.
Another cultural angle Friend deftly explores concerns the infancy of digital photography at the time. The speed with which images were downloaded and transmitted made it possible to inundate the planet with an earth-shattering story as never before. Friend also writes about what it might have been like if cell phone cameras had been available at the time: we would have witnessed what was going on inside the planes, the towers. (Although, for the families of the dead, it just might be a blessing they were spared those final traumatizing images.)
As a New Yorker who saw the towers burning from my bedroom window that day, I went into a state of shock and disbelief and a feeling that I could not believe my own eyes. Those who were brave enough to take the pictures help us to now see what we couldn’t digest at the time, help us now as we still struggle to understand one of the most overwhelming tragedies of our time. As one woman said who lost her cousin on that day: “We were in a dream, but the pictures were what was real.”
Review by Cheryl Reeves
Click here to buy:
0 comments:
Post a Comment