Some months after 9/11, I visited the mangled wreckage of the World Trade Center. My first (and last) visit to the WTC had been approximately a month and half before the attacks. I stared at the rubble and was deeply unnerved when I remembered how I had rode the elevator to the very top and looked down on the city. Even more disturbing was the image I had in my mind of what the collapse must have looked like from inside. Crews were still sifting through the wreckage, but most of the work had already been done.
A little ways out from the blast site was a small photo shop. Most of the pictures displayed were reproductions of famous news photographs of the attacks, but there were plenty of more obscure photos. I fixated on one picture of a graffiti’d wall–the words “You Are Alive” were spray-painted in black. I bought it on impulse and took it with me back to California. Since then, I’ve thought a great deal about the picture. It is easily the most powerful of all of the 9/11 images, and I’ve never really understood why. The simplicity? The earnestness? The uplifting yet melancholy underlying message? Whatever it makes me feel, I’ve never been able to put it into words.
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February 8, 2008 at 9:09 pm
kotare
This is a fascinating insight. A leitmotif of the 20th century, and early 21st, is the way vast numbers of people disappeared, or went ‘missing’ to use the military term, from the killing fields of WW1 France and Belgium, to those of Cambodia and Rwanda, and to the megacities of today.
Bill Manhire, in ‘Lifted’, wrote a poem which I think conveys something similar to the idea in your post. The poem is ‘Erebus Voices’, and commerates the crash of a New Zealand airliner into Mt Erebus, Antarctica, with total loss of life. Part of the poem runs as follows:
The Dead
We fell.
Yet we were loved and we are lifted.
We froze.
Yet we were loved and we are warm.
We broke apart.
Yet we are here and we are whole.
February 9, 2008 at 7:57 am
simlaughter
That’s an interesting connection, Strategist. Perhaps the greatest challenge in a “post-human” age such as ours is to be remembered as individuals with lives of our own, rather than statistics. I think that’s what at the heart of my picture (which hangs on my wall, one of the few pieces of decoration that I have).
February 18, 2009 at 3:14 am
heatherinparadise
I own a print of that very graffito, from the exhibition of photographs that toured the US after 9/11. It changed me, seeing that.
September 24, 2009 at 12:23 am
Ann
I have been looking everywhere for this print…I saw it somewhere and would like very much to buy a copy. Does anyone know where I can find it–or who the photographer is or the owner of copyright?
Thanks so much.