Manhattan, 10:15 AM, September 11th, 2001 by Melanie Einzig
LUC SANTE: I can understand her decision not to publish it right away. It would have been attacked as being insufficiently attentive to the enormity of the day. It would have seemed irreverent. When something of that magnitude happens, everything seems to be in service of awe, shock, reverence – reaffirming basic values, casting out demons. Something that includes such a violent contradiction within its depiction of the event – it just feels wrong. People wouldn’t have been able to take it in right away. […] Minutes after that picture was taken, you had all those people on Church street with vast clouds of debris pursuing them like a movie monster. Melanie’s photo argues in favor of there being more than one truth. There is a way of seeing this event as occurring in the middle of an ordinary day. At the same time that the twin towers were falling, there were people having toothaches. At the time you couldn’t give that credence – the enormity, the magnitude of the catastrophe seemed to crowd everything but itself out of the picture of life. Here you have evidence of that very simultaneity. MORE
[h/t Zoe Strauss]