The photo shows five people on the Brooklyn waterfront on 9/11. Two crouch, facing the smoke rising from lower Manhattan; three others stretch out on the embankment, facing away from the unfolding tragedy.
The photographer, Thomas Hoepker, waited four years to publish the image. He told David Friend, the author of the 9/11 book “Watching the World Change,” that his subjects were “totally relaxed like any normal afternoon.” Frank Rich wrote about the photo in his column last Sunday, saying it represented how the 9/11 trauma “would recede quickly for many.”
Now there’s a bit of a controversy, fanned by David Plotz in Slate, who argues that Rich was wrong on the face of it: “They’re almost certainly discussing the horrific event unfolding behind them. They have looked away from the towers for a moment not because they’re bored with 9/11, but because they’re citizens participating in the most important act in a democracy—civic debate.”
Ed Cone agrees.
Surely the photographer who was there understands the moment best? But wait — now one of the people in the photo has written in to Slate to say, no, the photographer got it all wrong, he never even talked to the people he was photographing, and of course they were talking about the attack on the World Trade Center and not just going about their daily business.
Who knows? I wouldn’t jump to blame-throwing in any direction. Rather, I’d note that the power and the appeal of the image lies in the archetype it evokes, one that goes back to an extremely famous Breughel painting: Breughel’s Icarus. You’ve probably seen it — it’s the one with the closeup of the ploughman in the foreground and the mythic tragedy unfolding so far in the distance it barely registers. W.H. Auden explicated the painting in his “Musee des Beaux Arts”; it’s about relative perspective, life going on while great events unfold in the background, and the way the ripples of tragedy and heroism pass over the surface of deep waters leaving nothing behind.
If Hoepker got his explanation of his image wrong, it’s important to know; and bless the Internet for making it easy for people to correct the record. Still, the image is potent on its own because it plugs into this tradition of thought. The people in Hoepker’s photo may have been fully engaged with the events of 9/11 at the instant the image was captured, but the image itself tells a different story, one of people at a safe remove from tragedy, unaffected visibly by it.
As Auden said: Suffering “takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Towers fall, yet “everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.” That’s the truth, and I think that’s ultimately what Rich was writing about.
[tags]9/11, photography, w.h. auden, breughel[/tags]