Barry Feinstein (1931-2011)
Barry Feinstein, the crafter of iconic pop culture images in the 1960s, is dead, aged 80.
The serendipitous meeting that transformed Barry Feinstein’s career took place in the early 1960s at the office of a longtime friend. That friend, Albert Grossman was then the manager of Bob Dylan, and thus began Mr. Feinstein’s close and enduring association with the legendary singer. Just before Dylan achieved his greatest fame, the duo travelled across America in a Rolls-Royce Grossman had bought in California and needed it driven east. Later, Feinstein would accompany Dylan on the European portion of a 1966 world tour and the 1974 Dylan and the Band tour.
It was during the former tour that he took the photo above; the iconic photo, taken in London in 1966, shows the singer in the back of a limousine smoking a cigarette and gazing straight ahead through dark sunglasses, seemingly oblivious to the imploring fans and the intrusive flashbulbs pressed against the window. In other unforgettable images from that tour, the singer was shown huddled in a seat in an otherwise empty Royal Albert Hall, playing with children in Liverpool and standing on a ferry dock in Australia, a photo later used as the cover for Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home.
“Just in their stark atmosphere, I liked the angles Barry used,” Dylan noted, no doubt thinking about the foreboding photo taken from below that graced the cover of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” — a portrait that recalled an earlier era of dustbowl hobo troubadours.
Barry Feinstein shot more than 500 album covers, and three established him as one of rock’s premier chroniclers. On the cover of Janis Joplin’s posthumous and final album was Feinstein’s photo of the troubled singer, taken the day before she died. For the Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet, he used the image of a dirty toilet in a graffiti covered bathroom taken at a bathroom at a Porsche repair shop in Los Angeles. The distributors believed it was too explicit for release and replaced it with a sparse white cover. And for “All Things Must Pass,” his first album after the breakup of the Beatles, George Harrison portentously posed for Feinstein amidst a pile of four toppled, garden gnomes. Mr. Feinstein recalled that for this album, he photographed George Harrison for days outside the singer’s home at Friar Park:
“Then someone called and told [Harrison] that the gnomes that were stolen from Friar Park in about 1871 could be bought back. They asked him if he wanted to buy them back. He said, ‘Sure.’ They brought them back and laid them on the lawn. We went out and looked at them. I said, ‘There’s the cover.’ We didn’t move a thing. In about two minutes, we had the cover. It was spontaneous.”
Most of his best work was shot in black-and-white, using high contrast film and no flash; he preferred natural light, just like that other giant of American photography, Robert Frank, to whom he was oft-compared to. He had no formal photography training and began his career as a photographer for Columbia Pictures, taking memorable images of Steve McQueen on set of his most famous film, Bullitt. He captured a heartbroken Marlene Dietrich at Gary Cooper’s funeral and a feisty Marlon Brando at a civil rights march facing counterdemonstrators taunting him with racist signs. He was called to Marilyn Monore’s home after she had been found dead; among the shots he took was one of the bottle of pills on her bedside table, “a chilling image of the reality behind the glittering facade of her celebrity” The Times commented.
And fittingly for someone, who more than any one else, has captured those realities, angst and hippiness of that 60s generation, Mr. Feinstein died last week at his longtime abode in Woodstock. He was 80.
James Nachtway on His Work
James Nachtwey is perhaps the greatest war photographer alive. Adapting Raleigh’s famous judgment on Henry VIII, one might even say that “if all the patterns and pictures of war photographers were lost to the world, they might be painted to the life from James Nachtway.”
He has covered conflicts and major social issues in more than 30 countries. Here, he talks about all the conflicts and tragedies he covered in last four decades.
Behind the Images: Gaddafi is Dead
Ironically for a man who had claimed that the revolutionaries trying to topple him were rats and cockroaches, Moammur el-Gaddafi took his final refuge in a drainpipe. A French Mirage jet which had attacked and scattered the convoy in which he was trying to flee was responsible for the dictator taking such an ignominious abode, but it was in the hands of the angry mob of fighters who recorded his last moments on video that Colonel Gaddafi met his bloody end.
Desmazes' Screenshot
A variant of lead photograph, featured in many of today’s newspapers will bear the name of Philippe Desmazes, an Agence France-Presse photographer. He was the only photographer in the area, when a rebel fighter pointed to where the deposed Libyan dictator had been captured, and another showed him mobile phone footage of a body, the one first broadcast by Al-Jazeera (below). “Are you sure it’s Gaddafi?” asked Mr. Desmazes, who subsequently made a grab from the footage and wired it.
In the coming days and weeks, there will no doubt be questions about who took the original footage, and whether we should credit photos to Mr. Desmazes only. The Times credited the photos to Mr. Desmazes and published them with an apologetic note: “It is an image of a man dead, or close to death, so harrowing that The Times would not normally publish it. But it records an historic moment — the end of the era of Muammar Gaddafi.”
The transitional Libyan government claims that Gaddafi was caught in crossfire, although the footage showed the badly injured, but undoubtedly conscious, former dictator being bundled on to the bonnet of a pick-up truck, his shirt being stripped from his torso and his body being dragged along the ground.
The photos of his body taken later, after it was driven to the neighboring city of Misrata, appeared to show bullet wounds to his head. The government maintains that the medical examiner could not say whether the bullet came from the revolutionary forces and the Gaddafi loyalists, but multiple sources claim that a New-York-Yankees-cap wearing twenty-year-old was responsible for Gaddafi’s demise. Mohammed El-Bibi later appeared brandishing Gadhafi’s gold 9mm gun in celebration, and told the BBC that he was the one who had found and captured Gadhafi and, as the dictator lie wounded, that he had snatched Gadhafi’s prized gun from him.
Later, fighters in Misurata surrounded the corpse, flashing the victory sign; Kareem Fahim’s photo for the New York Times (ab0ve) is eerily reminiscent of Che Guevera’s exit half-a-century earlier, but we can perhaps take solace in the fact that when the dust settles and the mystery surrounding his death clears, no one will be making a martyr out of Moammur el-Gaddafi.
Thaier Al-Sudani / Reuters
Tom Stoddart, Sarajevo
History of the Balkans is closely intertwined with violence. “From the ghastly massacres of Muslims committed by the Greek freedom fighters in 1821 down to Srebrenica and Kosovo in our own day, the savageries form an unbroken red stripe,” wrote Neal Acherson.
Recording these atrocities was the British photographer Tom Stoddart, whose black-and-white images sang the region’s elegiacs. Stoddart would be wounded in Sarajevo in 1992, but fell in love with the place, and returned to shoot the often. Among his photos, that of Sarajevo’s burnt out towers seen through the shattered windows of the Holiday Inn stood out.
On October 3rd 1992 — a day after some 100,000 people marched through the streets of Sarajevo to demonstrate for peace — the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army shelled the city from the hills surrounding it. For the next 1,200 days, the siege continued and as the world looked on, 12,000 people perished. They had to dig up football pitches to find room to bury the dead.
Today, it is easy to remember that Sarajevo in 1992 was a prosperous metropolis. Yugoslavia was not poor; it was one of the richest of the Eastern Bloc states and Sarajevo had hosted the Winter Olympics in 1984. The Holiday Inn, which would be the headquarters of the international media during the siege, was built in 1983. The UNIS Twin Towers of the above photo were built in 1986. Their destruction — and subsequent rebuilding — was symbolic because they were called Momo (Serbian name) and Uzeir (Bosniak name). No one knew which tower carried which name, and this ambiguity accentuated deep cultural unity between the peoples who lived side by side during those troubled times.
Muybridge’s Motion Studies
In 1872, on the very same year that he was commissioned by the railroad baron Leland Stanford to photograph Occident – one of Stanford’s prized race horses — in action, Eadweard J. Muybridge married a divorcé named Flora Stone. Muybridge was forty-three and Flora, twenty-one. They were happily married and when Flora became pregnant, Muybridge had no reason to suspect the child was anyone’s but his. But when he discovered a photograph of the child, with an annotation on the back reading “Little Harry,” Muybridge suddenly realized that Flora’s suspected affair with a dandy named Major Harry Larkyns had gone further than he had suspected.
Flying into a rage, he travelled roughly eighty miles to the city of Calistoga in northern Napa County, where Larkyns was staying. Witnesses record him as saying, “Good evening, Major. My name is Muybridge. Here is the answer to the message you sent my wife.” He then shot Larkyns once near the heart. Larkyns died instantly. Muybridge was arrested and tried, but acquitted on grounds that the killing was a justified defense of his family.
Needless to say, his high profile trial delayed his work with Leland Stanford somewhat, but in 1878, he finally succeeded in fulfilling his commission, and became one of the founding fathers of animation. Using a battery of 12 cameras he established, among other things, that a galloping horse does life all four feet off the ground — tucked underneath and not stretched out fore and aft like a running rabbit. Artists had mistakenly depicted otherwise for centuries; George Stubbs, that most famous painter of horses, had guessed that in each stride horses lift all four hooves off the ground at once, but until Muybridge, that had never been proven.
In between his trial and Stanford commission, Muybridge also found time to take photos up and down the Pacific coast for the national body in charge of lighthouses, including a sequence of unusual large-format seascapes completed in the 1870s, at precisely the time that Thomas Stevenson (father of Robert Louis) was designing his lighthouses around the coasts of Scotland. He also took large scale images of Yosemite and San Francisco. Later, Muybridge went on to made other motion studies, including beautiful cyanotype series on people and on animals borrowed from the Philadelphia Zoo for a project titled “Animal Locomotion”.
Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011)
In 1982, at his minimalist “office”, Diana Walker captured Jobs, who remembered, “This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.”
Steve Jobs, the heir to P.T. Barnum and Henry Ford, is dead, aged 56.
While many decry him for putting form over function, Steven Paul Jobs came closer than any other entrepreneur in modern history in understanding the power of ease and aesthetics. While it was an uninspiring beige box, his first Apple Macintosh had proportionally spaced fonts. The latest MacBook deploys a sleep indicator that is timed to the human breathing rhythm.
Like Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, he didn’t personally invent the products he came to symbolize, and like those industry titans, he died in a world largely of his making. A charismatic showman, Jobs understood the visual power of images. Apple’s 1984 ad was perhaps one of the most memorable commercials in history. And after leading Pixar to its early successes, Jobs triumphantly returned to Apple in 1997 with a hugely popular advertising campaign, “Think Different”, featuring many inspirational and influential icons of the last century. When iPod was released, the silhouetted models whose only identifiable features were white headphones became instantly-recognizable, and oft-parodied, icons.
But the ur-icon of Apple was Mr. Jobs himself, in his signature turtleneck jumper, jeans and trainers. His presentations at Apple expos were passionate and captivating; his slides visually simple, yet striking. Altogether, he managed to whip up a quasi-religious fervour for his company and its products. To some, he was an iGod; to others, he was an iCon.
But history will not downplay Jobs’ idiosyncrasies, paternalist outbursts, and irascible rule at Apple. As Auden wrote of tyrants,
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand.
A Walk To The Paradise Garden
W. Eugene Smith was no doubt one of the greatest war correspondents of the last century. As the photographer for Life, he followed the island-hopping American offensive against Japan, from Saipan to Guam, from Iwo Jima to Okinawa, where he was hit by mortar fire, and invalided back.
His war wounds cost him two painful years of hospitalization and plastic surgery. During those years he took no photos, and it was doubtful whether he would ever be able to return to photography. Then one day in 1946, he took a walk with his two children towards a sun-bathed clearing:
While I followed my children into the undergrowth and the group of taller trees – how they were delighted at every little discovery! – and observed them, I suddenly realized that at this moment, in spite of everything, in spite of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it….
Pat saw something in the clearing, he grasped Juanita by the hand and they hurried forward. I dropped a little farther behind the engrossed children, then stopped. Painfully I struggled — almost into panic — with the mechanical iniquities of the camera….
I tried to, and ignore the sudden violence of pain that real effort shot again and again through my hand, up my hand, and into my spine … swallowing, sucking, gagging, trying to pull the ugly tasting serum inside, into my mouth and throat, and away from dripping down on the camera….
I knew the photograph, though not perfect, and however unimportant to the world, had been held…. I was aware that mentally, spiritually, even physically, I had taken a first good stride away from those past two wasted and stifled years. (See original text)
While he was right about his stride towards recovery, Smith miscalculated the photo’s importance. In 1955, a heavily indebted Smith decided to submit the photo to Edward Steichen’s famous Family of Man exhibit at the MOMA. There, it became a finalist, thus cementing its position as the ur-icon of all family photographs.
Robert Whitaker (1939 – 2011)
Robert Whitaker, the inadvertent father of one of the most sought-after Beatles memorabilia, is dead, aged 71.
From his very first photo of The Beatles — that of McCartney and Harrison holding boomerangs — Robert Whitaker proved to be an abnormal photographer. With his unerring eye for the weird, Whitaker went on to craft many surreal images of the band at the height of their fame in the 1960s. Handpicked by the band’s manager Brian Epstein, Whitaker was reluctant to photograph the band until he saw it in concert and being ‘overwhelmed’ by the screaming fans of Beatlemania.
In three short years he covered the band, from 1964 to 1966, he complied a remarkable dossier, shooting the band at home, in recording studio, during private moments and in formal photo-sessions, often involving unusual props. In one session, he had the group holding a car spring, a sun parasol, a broom, and an umbrella to represent spring, summer, autumn and winter. And the Fab Four enjoyed his company and his creative mind, mainly because they were fed up with taking market-friendly publicity pictures.
But the most notorious use of props came in March 1966. Inspired by the German surrealist Hans Bellmer, Whitaker created the infamous butcher cover, which featured the group with slabs of raw meat and the dismembered body parts of children’s dolls. He called it “Somnambulant Adventure” and conceived it as a triptych in which he would present The Beatles as religious icons, adding halos to the picture and referencing the story of Moses and the Israelites worshipping a golden calf. He wanted it to be a cynical commentary on adulation and stardom:
All over the world, I’d watched people worshipping them like idols, like gods. I was trying to show that The Beatles were flesh and blood”.
The photos were used in Britain without controversy, but when they were sent to America to be used at Capitol Records, the distributors refused to handle the record. While it was not the case, the fans viewed the cover as a commentary on Capitol Records’ periodic “butchering” and rearranging of The Beatles records. The retailers denounced the cover as “sick”. The band also was divided; Lennon and McCartney defended the cover, while vegetarian Harrison thought the whole idea was gross and stupid. Still concerned by the commercial backlash following John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comment, Capitol Records withdrew the cover and apologized. The rare original covers went on to become one of the most sought-after Beatles memorabilia.
Whitaker’s association with The Beatles ended soon afterwards. He never had the chance to finish his triptych, but he went on to become a key figure in London’s emerging counterculture, to create Cream’s seminal 1967 album Disraeli Gears, and to take a series of famous pictures of Salvador Dali, his lifelong idol.
The First Times Photo
Forty five years ago, Deano Risley, who died earlier this year, played a role in a small and peculiar milestone; his photograph of the then Chancellor of Exchequer Jim Callaghan made photographic history as it became the first photograph to appear on the front page of The Times (of London) on May 3, 1966. On that day, as part of the modernisation spearheaded by its Editor, Sir William Haley, before the paper’s acquisition by Lord Thomson of Fleet, news replaced the traditional classified advertising on the front page of The Times.
Until a century ago, the front page of many newspapers contained no news at all; they were pretty much dominated by advertisements that reflected social class and political leanings of their readers. However, by with the advent of photography, sensationalist headlines and desire to differentiate themselves from other papers, led many to veer away from this historical pattern by the mid-20th century. By the late 20th century, the trend has completely been reversed: to have ads on the frontpages was considered to be distasteful, and to violate the purity of page one and the sacred wall between news and business. In recent years, as news business struggles to survive, we may have come full circle as many major newspapers began reintroducing ads to their frontpages.
Deano Risley too belonged to a different age, the time where many newspaper photographers remained relatively unknown. His obscurity was such that only The Times covered his death and there are only a handful of Google search results mentioning him (and all linked back to that Times obituary). However, The Times obituary suggests that he was a stellar photojournalist — he recorded trials and tribulations of Britain during those giddy and uncertain years of the 50s and the 60s: the wreckage of the Liverpool-Euston express; the raising off the submarine HMS Truculent, which sank in the Thames Estuary after colliding with a Swedish tanker with heavy loss of life in January 1950; the Suez crisis in 1956; the muddy tunnels and caverns under the Mendips. His photo of St Paul’s Cathedral, which appeared in The Times of January 1, 1960, was one of the first to be published using the Vario-Klischograph electromechanical engraving technique.
Ethiopian Famine
The Ethiopian famine gained global recognition in October 1983 when a report filmed by Mohamed Amin (then Visnews’ Africa Bureau Chief) and filed by Michael Buerk of the BBC was screened on the Nine O’Clock News. Up to that point, despite repeated warnings, detailed official accounts, a Disasters Emergency Committee’ appeal and various news reports failed to move the famine to centre stage. It was judged to be marginal and largely ‘unnewsworthy’.
Buerk went to Ethiopia in July of 1983 to report on the emergency committee’s appeal and only filmed in southern Ethiopia, which was comparatively lush and suffering to a lesser degree. However, in October 1983, Amin and Buerk focused on the northern towns of Korem and Makelle, the epicentres of the famine. They were unprepared for the scale of the human distress they encountered, and their profound state of shock was palpable in Buerk’s solemn tones broadcast the BBC’s evening news of 23 October 1984:
Dawn. as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem. it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th century. This place, sax’ workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth. Thousands of wasted people are coming here for help. Many find only death… Death is all around … Korem, an insignificant town, has become a place of grief.
These words would achieve legendary status; the footage was said to have moved usually stoic newsrooms to tears and prompted donations from habitually hardened news staff. It was carried by 425 of the world’s major broadcasting agencies; in Britain, Oxfam’s switchboards were jammed for three days. Even the tabloids such as The Sun joined in a two-inch headline “Race to Save the Babies” (28 October 1983).
Fuelled by popular support, an enormous aid operation ensued; pop star Bob Geldof responded by recording “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, a single that sought to ‘save the world at Christmas time’, under the name ‘Band Aid’. It culminated in the legendary Live Aid Concert of July 1985, which was staged simultaneously at Wembley Arena and the MK Stadium in Philadelphia. Sixteen hours long, it was beamed via 13 satellites to 120 nations and to an estimated 1.6 billion people, a third of the world’s population. The “biggest philanthropic music concert in history” raised £144 million world wide.
Is God Misogynist? | Abbas
In 1985, the Catholic Church started World Youth Day, a biannual/triannual event where young believers celebrate their faith. In August 1997, such event was held in Paris where Magnum’s Abbas photographed three women praying in the street.
Three years later, the magazine L’Express used the photograph in an article entitled «Dieu est-il misogyne?» (“Is God misogynist?”). The article denounced «offenses faites aux femmes au nom de Dieu» (“Offenses done to women in the name of God”), by all three major religions. (Full Article Here).
Two of the three women in the photo sued the magazine for the breach of their reputation and privacy. They claimed that their reputation was “violated” and they suffered “moral and emotional damage”. The complainants claimed that when they knelt on the Place Dauphine, it was a public demonstration of their faith.
L’Express and Magnum countersued, with the support of Association Nationale des Journalistes, Reporters, Photographes et Cinéastes (National Association of Journalists, Reporters, Photographers, and Filmmakers or ANJRPC). Their demand was a symbolic euro in damages for abusive use of the law. Melodramatically, the magazine told the court, “You have in your hands the future of photojournalism.”
The photo opened a debate over whether photographers and journalists need to seek the agreement of all the people photographed in a public place, and in 2002, the court ruled in favor of freedom of expression, while sanctioning the magazine for using the photo out of context. This solomonic ruling reaffirmed the right to publish a photograph taken without the consent of the people at a public event.
The Day The Twin Towers Fell
9/11 was painful — but so was the harried decade that followed it.
(continued from yesterday; some may find some images that follow disturbing)
Magnum’s Thomas Hoepker crossed from Manhattan into Queens and then Brooklyn to get closer to the scene. In Williamsburg, he captured the above pastoral scene, but decided to hold back the photo, feeling that it was “ambiguous and confusing.” When finally published on 9/11′s fifth anniversary, the calm scene seemingly challenged the conventional wisdom that “nothing in America will ever be the same again”.
On the first glance, the photo espoused the quintessentially Seidfeldian — and by extension, New Yorkian — values of nihilism. Accordingly, Frank Rich opened the debate by saying the photograph is a prescient symbol of indifference and amnesia: “This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. They’re just American.” This assessment was met with objections from many people, including the photographer himself and the people in the photo. (More ….)
The photo recalls Bruegel’s The Fall of Icarus, where a peasant nonchalantly plowed as the titular boy plunges to his death, and the poem it inspired: W. H. Auden wrote, “How Everything Turns Away/Quite Leisurely from the disaster.“
*
But it was a different poem by Auden that was frequently quoted in the days following 9/11: the unmentionable odour of death/offends the September night, he wrote about the month the Second World War began. The couplet clearly underlined the cyclical nature of violence, destruction, and fanaticism, and perhaps it was also fitting that one of the most famous photos from 9/11 was also taken by a man who once covered the D-Day landings — Marty Lederhandler of AP.
A veteran photographer of 65 years, Lederhandler had seen plenty of fires and explosions; his advanced age prevented him from heading out to the WTC site, so the 84-year old photographer went to the Rainbow Room on the G.E. Building — now more famously known as 30 Rock, and took a well-framed photo of the disaster before 30 Rock itself was evacuated.
*
Jonathan Torgovnik returned the next morning to take this photo from the fifth-floor window of the neighbouring 1 Liberty Plaza, which was also in danger of falling. He remembers: “I randomly opened the door to one of the offices, walked in, and got the picture. I remember it being so eerie, thinking of the people who might have been there when it happened, and then their not being there — and yet I felt their presence.”
*
Over three thousand people perished that day, but the photographs from 9/11 do not show mangled corpses and bloody carnage. There was an agreement among print media and television broadcasters not to show any corpses in connection with the attacks, and when the above picture by Todd Maisel, titled “The Hand, 9/11″ appeared in the New York Daily News, it was roundly criticized.
But in the following years, this decency and deference that the American media maintained towards the government will be strained. Photographs of military funerals, coffins and even deaths and injuries will be banned by an administration which insisted that the control of information is vital to national security. Many photographers would find restrictions and censorships of an embedded assignment suffocating, but such assignments became a new normal in the symbiotic and uneasy relationship between the military and the media.
*
David Surowiecki took the above photo of people jumping off the towers.
On September 11, Richard Drew was also covering the Fall Fashion Week. He rushed to the site, where he captured the dramatic pictures of the people jumping out of the towers. In most American newspapers, his photos ran once and were never seen again; the memories of “jumpers” were so heartrending, their plunges so traumatic and their suicides so stigmatic that officially and journalistically, they ceased to exist.
In official records, nobody had jumped; no one had ever been a jumper. Instead, people fell or were forced out by the heat, the smoke and the flames. A decade on, this denial still holds. The 9/11 Museum will consign the story of the jumpers into a hidden alcove, and there is widespread reluctance to DNA-identify the remains. In that sense, the jumpers were modern unknown soldiers, and their pictures, the photographic equivalent of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
We will never know truly their motives, but retellings of the jumpers’ stories were at best a measured alteration of history, and a signal of many such revisions to come, as politicians and pundits continue to hijack the narrative and legacy of 9/11.
*
Nowhere was this hijacking more blatant than in 9/11 Truther Movement, which held that the American Government perpetrated the attacks and the subsequent cover-up as casus bellorum for Afghanistan and Iraq. One of their claim was that the Pentagon was attacked by a missile, rather than a plane. The above photo taken by Daryl Donley, one of the first photographers to arrive to the Pentagon, became a centerpiece of their argument. Blithely ignoring many eyewitnesses who saw a plane crash, and large pieces of airplane debris recovered from the site, they continue to protest shrilly that there was no plane in Donley’s photo.
*
“Mr. President, a second aircraft has hit the World Trade Center. America’s under attack.”
With these portentous words, the White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informed President Bush of the attacks. Bush was reading to a class of Florida schoolchildren, and his shock was palpable. Seldom are such crucial moments of a presidency recorded live, and for Bush it was an especially watershed moment. Previously, he had repeated said he was more interested in nation building at home than interventions abroad, but he would ironically find himself becoming a close ally with a country whose leader’s name he famously forgot.
Not wishing to alarm the kids, Bush remained in that classroom for few more minutes; while the president was initially lauded for his grace, as criticism grew in the following years, the “Pet Goat” moment was increasingly pointed out as symptomatic of his dithering presidency.
*
AP’s photographer Doug Mills was the only photographer to accompany President Bush to the presidential evacuation center in Nebraska and then back to Washington. On September 14th, Mills captured President Bush standing front of the World Trade Center debris with firefighter Bob Beckwith. With megaphone in hand, Bush applauded the crowd of rescue workers with the confidence of the Andover cheerleader he once was.
Inside the National Cathedral, Bush became, in the words of the officiating priest, “our George”; religious undertones were abundantly clear. And ironically for a president who would since give his name to linguistic maladroitness, Bush’s speech and grace immediately following the disaster were compared to those of Churchill and Roosevelt. But Bush would find this journalistic and international good-will short-lived. Seven years later, he would enter the records dubiously as a president who enjoyed both the highest and the lowest approval ratings in history.
*
John Labriola, who had an office on the 71st Floor of the Tower One snapped this photo of firefighter Mike Kehoe rushing up the Tower One as Labriola was evacuating. The photo was taken just minutes before the tower collapsed, and when the Daily Mirror ran the next morning, the editors were uncertain whether he survived or not. Six of his colleagues who went up the same staircase died, but Kehoe survived, and the photo won him instant acclaim; Tony Blair held up the photo to proclaim, “This man is a hero.” He also found unwanted attention from reporters, well-wishers and stalkers.
The photo perfectly encapsulates the dedication of 343 firefighters who perished, and thousands of other first responders, law enforcement officials and ordinary heroes that day. But sadly, their stories also represent the ephemeral nature of the unity achieved on 9/11. A decade on, political horse-trading would lead to the responders being denied medical coverage and compensation.
In doing so, the political classes displayed their moral spinelessness and hypocrisy, while the media — which took months even to remove miniature American flags from their screens — refused to cover it. One can reflect the bitter irony that the debate over the first responders has became such a frenzied charade that a comedian became its voice of sound reason. (See Jon Stewart’s emotional return to latenight after 9/11).
*
As the global finance wobbled in the recent years, the above photo by Susan Ogrocki (Reuters) became one of my favorite 9/11 photos. Taken right around the corner from the Ground Zero, the photo reminds me that the attacks were a seminal event for the global finance too, not least because the target was at the heart of American fiance.
Before September 2001, the United States entered a recession caused by the dotcom crash; after 9/11. The Federal Reserve repeatedly intervened by halving the interest rates, and after 9/11, these interventions only intensified and it pumped in over $100 billion into the financial system to calm the markets. The nation went on war footing, and the congress also embarked on a vast spending spree for rebuilding, counterterrorism and defense.
There was no doubt that the global economy benefited from these massive spendings, but coming as they did after the dotcom crash, the regrowth introduced a delusion that boom-bust-cycle has been broken. Housing prices increased again, and mortgage rates plummeted — a trend that continued right until 2007. Causes of the current financial crisis are complex, but in the financial detoxification we are currently going through, one can find consequences of many poisons 9/11 engendered.
*
Many seminal events of the last decade didn’t happen just because of 9/11, but there is no denying that 9/11′s significance — both real and imaginary — is huge. Like a black hole, it produced a force so large, so dark and so unfathomably that it rearranged the geopolitical heavens. The long shadows of the Twin Towers, and the vacuum their destruction created both came to dominate the decade that followed it. It was perhaps a paradox best underlined by the Ground Zero — simultaneously a hallowed ground and an open wound.
.
(P.S.: I am sorry for this rushed, long and rambling post. I leave for a stressful business trip to Moscow tomorrow and that’s why I brought forward 9/11 commemorative posts ahead. I had no idea that they will also be this stressful to write. As always, follow me on Twitter, and suggest your favorite 9/11 photos below.)
(P.P.S.: I was asked by a reader of this blog to pass this information along. “My Fellow American” is an online film and social media project that highlights being a Muslim in America. Check it out.)
