The first eyewitness I heard interviewed on television on the morning of the 11th, a tourist with a heavy German accent, described seeing a plane fly into World Trade Center Tower One and exclaimed, "And would you believe it? My camera didn't work! I tried to snap and nothing happened!" His voice expressed the frustration and also the embarrassment of thinking about wanting to take pictures at such a moment.
To photograph is to look in a different way -- to look without understanding. Understanding is deferred until we see the developed image. This deferral is inherent to photography and to trauma, and thus photography may be best suited to help us understand the events of Sept. 11. Indeed, in the days and months following the attacks of Sept. 11 we have seen a proliferation of photojournalistic and amateur images, published in magazines and collected in exhibitions and books. It is an event that needs to be seen, and the deferral inherent to the photograph enables us not only to see the event and its aftermath, but also to experience an essential element of the attacks: the ways in which time expanded from the instant of the attack to its infinite repercussions and the way in which comprehension was deferred. The now of the photographic image is composed of layers of interconnected moments and this is nowhere as apparent as in the images of what we call Sept. 11 " a moment that has expanded backwards and forwards into durational time.
The photojournalists who have been interviewed since September all comment on this incongruous temporality. One photographer injured during the collapse was surprised to see the images he had taken of the explosion after the first plane hit printed in the New York Daily News with his byline. He could not remember taking the pictures. Another said she did not know where she had been on that day until she was able to look at her prints. A third reported that the lab technician called to ask him if he knew what was visible in one of his pictures of the exploding tower -- a person holding on to a piece of the falling building. He had not seen that as he was shooting. Here is an example of what Walter Benjamin called the camera's "optical unconscious:" the technologies of sight reveal more than we can see through the eye, but the realization of that supplemental revelation is deferred.
This may be why the camera offers not only a vehicle with which to see the sight of trauma but also a form of protection and distancing. "When I couldn't photograph, I really had to look," said photographer Lorie Novak of her thwarted effort to take pictures of the search/memorial walls at the New York Family Center. The pictures she took from a distance inscribe the metal barrier separating her from the posters of the missing -- the barrier is a figure for the inherently distancing camera. Thus, time and space work the same way in the photograph, they expand, allowing both distance and deferral, even as they contract to get closer to the moment, the sight itself.
One might say that every picture prompts us to relive, not just to remember, the moment of the disaster. The single still frame provides a means by which to replay and also to attempt to master the trauma of Sept. 11. It provides, most of all, a sense of the contradiction between the unchanging unrelenting passage of time moving forward, and the sense provided by Sept. 11, that time stopped, that a new era has begun, that there is no going back.
