Nine Years Later

You may remember a little while back that I mentioned that I'd happened across a box of photographs I'd put in my storage space on Vandam street sometime back in 2003. I put a few of them up not too long back. Well, along with those shots, I came across an envelope of images from the week of September 11th, 2001. Like many other folks on that day, as the events were unfolding, I reached for my camera and took several shots of the towers as they burned. At the time, I don't believe I was sure why; it just seemed like the thing to do. It seemed like something to document. It was, after all, history in the making.

I've never known really what to do with the photos. I certainly never put them in a photo album, and the notion of posting them here always seemed a bit needless or tasteless. In the last nine years, most of the times I've seen images of that day, they've usually been misappropriated to drive home some political point. As I said way back when, the folks who seem the most obstreperous about the events of September 11th, 2001 usually tend to live nowhere near New York City.

In any case, upon re-discovering these pics, I thought about finally putting them up. Then, of course, all this business of the proposed Islamic community center -- the wrongly-described "Ground Zero Mosque" -- and the brouhaha regarding the burning of Qurans down in Florida transpired. Just so we're clear on these issues, I think there's no reason why that community center shouldn't be built and there's no reason to burn fucking anything this fucking Saturday. As Slate elegantly asserted in this article, those responsible for the events of September 11th, 2001 are no more representative of the whole of Islam than the Reverend Terry Jones' pig-ignorant fundamentalist sect of fatuous slackjaws are indicative of the whole of Christianity. But it seems like those points are a little too nuanced for people who'd rather get in a self-righteous froth about it and push us further towards an irreparable state of disharmony.

So, yeah, in light of this, I figured that pictures of the burning towers would be poorly-timed and counter-productive. The pictures I did see fit to put up, however, are images that I find to be a great deal more powerful. Shot in the days shortly after, I snapped a few shots of the makeshift tributes, shrines and memorials to the fallen. Closer scrutiny of these pictures reveals some recurring messages that are worth mulling over; "Respect life," "Peace is Possible," "We Stand for Peace," etc. What's happened to those sentiments?