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The Public Face of 9/11: Memory and Portraiture in the Landscape
Jonathan Hyman
| On September 11, 2001, when people began hanging store-bought flags and decorating both private and public property with memorial artwork and displays, handmade flags, and slogans, I knew I was looking at the beginning of a powerful grass-roots response to a national tragedy. But it was then too early in what became a five-year photography project for me to grasp what I came to understand six months later: Americans were talking to each other. They were speaking out loud in public on their cars, houses, and places of business, on their bodies, and anywhere else they could find the space. Two years after the attacks, after I had seen a broad range of artistic expression, I understood that the response was an overwhelmingly visual one and so pervasive that the outpouring of sentiment carried Americans into rare territory—a place where private emotions tied up with terrorism and loss met mass public expression. The result is a new memorial vocabulary surrounding the 9/11 attacks that, in addition to including many phrases and symbols, also includes two new American icons: the World Trade Center towers and the image of three New York City fire fighters raising the American flag in the ruins of the towers. |
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Because there was such a wide variety of memorials displayed in so many places immediately after the attacks—some of them moving around on motor vehicles and human bodies—I knew I would need to have a camera with me at all times if I wanted to capture this seminal moment in history. So, since September 11, 2001, I have been traveling with my camera every day, recording the heartfelt and idiosyncratic ways people have been making memorials to display their sorrow, patriotism, anger, and, in some cases, wishes for peace, unity, war, or revenge. What I have recorded is poignant and not always pleasant. |
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Over the course of five years, I have compiled a large assortment of American vernacular responses to the attacks—from the inner city to rural areas, from the spectacular to the banal. I estimate I have taken over fifteen thousand pictures. By design, many of my photographs document the passage of time and the particularities of the 9/11 artwork; occasionally, they depict intimate and revealing moments in the life of a neighborhood. |
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I have traveled the East Coast from Maine to northern Virginia and parts of the Midwest, making stops at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the Pentagon, and ground zero in New York City. It has been my goal to capture the essence of the artwork and displays I encountered as elements in a broader landscape. Across the landscape, people were expressing different emotions and opinions. The things they were saying and the ways they were (and still are) saying them may have been offensive to some, but the language and artwork were comprehensible. The new memorial vocabulary of 9/11 allowed Americans to speak to each other freely, openly, and sometimes profanely. Many of the pictures in my collection were taken in less than ideal circumstances. I photographed what I saw, and I never passed something up because I thought it was ugly, contrary to my beliefs, inconvenient to locate, or difficult or dangerous to photograph. I have tried to present the 9/11 memorial response I saw as woven into the fabric of the landscape and indeed the fabric of daily life. Working this way allowed me to produce, with as little mediation as possible, a transformative document that functions by recontextualizing memorial images as they become part of the landscape. The photographs I took depict a national dialogue and present a unique chronicle and portrait of post-9/11 society as seen through the American vernacular. |
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