"[This book] embodies the Buddhist wisdom about change, life, and the
world more than anything written after the events of that day."
Robert Stone

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September 7, 2007

SEEING, BELIEVING, REMEMBERING

At times, what I remember most distinctly are the images snapped by average citizens: the shot of the architect who, eight months into her pregnancy, stood on Fifth Avenue and asked a co-worker photograph her with the smoking towers in the distance (below); the woman upset and disheveled as she adjusted her hairpin, talking on her cell phone as her bedroom TV set echoed the horror outside her window; the man collapsed into the folds of a dust-covered wall, weeping into his phone....

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PHOTO COURTESY ISABEL DASER BESSLER

These instants, most of them captured by New York-area residents who decided to make public their private views of the day, were gathered for an exhibition that has become the most significant archive of still photographs – some 8,000 strong -- related to the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. Now, many of those pictures (from the original exhibition/installation/archive/book of the same name: Here is New York, curated by Alice Rose George, Gilles Peress, Michael Shulan, and Charles Traub) will go on view in an exhibition that opens at the New-York Historical Society.

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The photographs will be accompanied by objects recovered from the World Trade Center site: a messenger bike, the remains of a safety-deposit box, a melted timepiece – all forming a sort of time capsule of our collective September 11 experience.

The exhibition runs through January 2008.

RELATED POSTING: RFK’S ECHOES & HERE IS NEW YORK

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