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Thomas Hoepker photograph

New Yorkers, apparently relaxing as the burning Twin Towers tells us much about the history and memory

Photography

Thomas Hoepker took the September 11, 2001, a group of New Yorkers Sat cat in the sun in a park in Brooklyn. Behind them, through the bright blue water in a blue sky, a cloud of smoke and dust terrible rises on Manhattan, where two towers were hit by hijacked planes that morning and collapsed, causing death, fire, smoke, falling or jumping or crushing and tearing and fragmentation of the fall of the terminal, nearly 3,000 people.

Ten years later, became an iconic photographs of 9 / 11, but his story is strange and tortuous. Hoepker, a leader of the cooperative of the famous Magnum photographers, decided not to publish in 2001 and to exclude a book of Magnum Photos from that horrible day like no other. It was not until 2006, the fifth anniversary of the attacks, he did it in a book and the controversy instantly. The critic and columnist Frank Rich wrote about it in The New York Times. It is this image was no doubt an allegory concern of the American failure to learn from that tragic day of deep, to change or reform as a nation, "Young Mr. Hoepker photograph need not be cruel United States .. It is only ".

In other words, a country that believes in the movement he was enjoying the sun, although the scene of mass murder that the scars daily. In fact, I can not think of five New Yorkers, apparently insensitive resemble celebrities of the decade the television sitcom Seinfeld in 1990 that the last episode of the series are sentenced under the Good Samaritan law regardless of other .

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rich image was played instantly. Sips Walter, who identified himself as the type of tones in the right side of the picture, he said, and his girlfriend, apparently sunbathing on a wall, were in fact "in a deep state of shock and disbelief . "Hoepker, both complained, was photographed without authorization in a way that they lied about their feelings and behaviors.

Well, you can not photograph a feeling. However, five years on the work that appeared in 2006, it seems pointless to argue about the morality of the people on the photo or the photographer, or his decision to retain the image of the publication. It is now established as one of the photographs of the definition of that day - the 10th anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center on the revision of the observer to release this August that

Today, the meaning of this picture has nothing to do with the people to judge. He became a film on the history and memory. As an image of a historic moment that captures something catastrophic is true of all historical moments: life does not stop died of a battle or an act of terror is through. Artists and writers have said that the truth forever. In his painting The Fall of Icarus, the Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel depicts a farmer plowing in which a child falls to his death into the sea beyond, is an observation similar to that of Hoepker. WH Auden this painting lines in his poem Musée des Beaux Arts are easily applicable to photography: "In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away disaster / very quiet ..."

like Stendhal captures the dissonance of the story in his novel The Charterhouse of Parma. A young volunteer to fight for Napoleon at Waterloo, but instead of a defining moment of what I value the experiences are random, accidents marginal, meaningless on the banks of the great day.

story is not a heroic story or memory of a block of marble inscribed with the words of eternal pain and anger. As Tony Blair - whose own response to this act of inhuman cruelty was to have historic consequences - said that day in his book A Journey, "It's amazing how fast the shock is absorbed and the natural rhythm of the human spirit is reaffirmed ... remember, but not as we feel right now. "

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