9/11's Most Controversial Photo
Thomas Hoepker's photo of
New Yorkers apparently relaxing as the twin towers smoulder says much about
history and memory
In the photograph Thomas Hoepker
took on 11 September 2001, a group of New Yorkers sit chatting in the sun in a
park in
Ten years on, this is becoming one of the iconic
photographs of 9/11, yet its history is strange and tortuous. Hoepker, a senior figure in the renowned Magnum
photographers' co-operative, chose not to publish it in 2001 and to exclude it
from a book of Magnum pictures of that horribly unequalled day. Only in 2006,
on the fifth anniversary of the attacks, did it appear in a book, and then it
caused instant controversy. The critic and columnist Frank Rich wrote about it in
the New York Times. He saw in this undeniably troubling picture an allegory of
In other words, a country that believes in moving
on they have already moved on, enjoying the sun in spite of the scene of mass
carnage that scars the fine day. Indeed, I can't help thinking the five
apparently unmoved New Yorkers resemble the characters in the famous 1990s
television comedy Seinfeld, who in the show's final episode are convicted under
a Good Samaritan law of failing to care about others.
Rich's view of the picture was instantly disputed.
Walter Sipser, identifying himself as the guy in
shades at the right of the picture, said he and his girlfriend, apparently
sunbathing on a wall, were in fact "in a profound state of shock and
disbelief". Hoepker, they both complained, had
photographed them without permission in a way that misrepresented their
feelings and behaviour.
Well, you can't photograph a feeling. But another
five years on since it surfaced in 2006, it seems pointless to argue about the
morality of the people in the picture, or of the photographer, or his decision to
withhold the picture from publication. It is now established as one of the
defining photographs of that day – with the 10th anniversary of the World Trade
Centre's destruction approaching, the Observer Review republished it this
August as the 9/11 photograph.
It is the only photograph of that day to assert the
art of the photographer: among hundreds of devastating pictures, by amateurs as
well as professionals, that horrify and transfix us because they record the
details of a crime that outstripped imagination – even Osama bin Laden dared
not expect such a result – this one stands out as a more ironic, distanced, and
therefore artful, image. Perhaps the real reason Hoepker
sat on it at the time was because it would be egotistical to assert his own
cunning as an artist in the midst of mass slaughter.
Today, the meaning of this photograph has nothing
to do with judging individuals. It has become a picture about history, and
about memory. As an image of a cataclysmic historical moment it captures
something that is true of all historical moments: life does not stop dead
because a battle or an act of terror is happening nearby. Artists and writers
have told this truth down the ages. In his painting The Fall of Icarus, the Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel
depicts a peasant ploughing on as a boy falls to his death in the sea beyond:
it is a very similar observation to Hoepker's. WH
Auden's lines on this painting in his poem Musée des
Beaux Arts apply perfectly to the photograph: "In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away / Quite
leisurely from the disaster …"
Stendhal similarly captures the dissonance of
history in his novel The Charterhouse of Parma. A young man volunteers to fight
for Napoleon at
History is not a heroic story, nor memory a block
of marble inscribed with imperishable words of grief and rage. As Tony Blair –
whose own response to this act of inhuman cruelty was to have such historic
consequences – says of that day in his book A Journey, "It is amazing how
quickly shock is absorbed and the natural rhythm of the human spirit reasserts
itself … We remember, but not as we felt at that moment."
Personally I remember the shock of that moment
perfectly. I have nightmares about it, which is strange, considering I am not
an American and witnessed it only on television in Hackney,
And so, 10 years on, the meaning of this photograph
is that memories fade fast. The people in the foreground are us. We are the
ones whose lives went on, touched yet untouched, separated from the heart of
the tragedy by the blue water of time, which has got ever wider and more
impossible to cross. A 10-year-old event belongs to history, not the present.
To feel the full sorrow of it now you need to watch a documentary – and then
you will switch to something lighter, either because it is painfully clear that
too much blood has been spent around the world in the name of this disaster, or
simply because changing channels is what humans do. The people in this photograph
cannot help being alive, and showing it.
Jonathan Jones
guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 September 2011 13.47 BST