Interpreting a photograph
Betsy's Page
Richard B. Woodward has such an interesting tale of a
photograph from 9/11. German photographer Thomas Hoepker
captured a picture of five young people across the river from
the smoke coming up from the World Trade Center. Click here
to see the photograph and see what you think of it,
opinionjournal.com
then read Woodward's story of how the photographer five years
letter and Frank Rich decided to put their own interpretation
on what the photo showed and use it to demonstrate that
Americans were fated to "move on" quickly from the trauma of
that day. Frank Rich wrote,
<<< "from the perspective of 9/11's fifth anniversary, Mr.
Hoepker's photo is prescient as well as important--a snapshot
of history soon to come. What he caught was this: Traumatic
as the attack on America was, 9/11 would recede quickly for
many. 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." >>>
Woodward's point is very well-taken. You don't need
photographers photoshopping phony bomb damage or inserting
stuffed animals to change how we view an event. You can have
photographers just misusing a photo to fit their own
interpretation of events. And, in so doing, they tell us more
about themselves than about the event they're trying to
portray.
As Woodward writes,
<<< Mr. Hoepker suppressed his photograph of the "blasé" New
Yorkers for four years because, he said, it did not express
the rage and suffering that he and millions felt that day.
The image didn't fit the accepted narrative of the event. As
Mr. Friend writes in his book, "it did not meet any of our
standard expectations of what a September 11th photograph
should look like."
With the passage of time, however, Mr. Hoepker has gone back
and re-evaluated the image. Last year he was proud enough to
choose it as the catalog cover for his retrospective in
Munich. He now compares it to Breughel's "Landscape With the
Fall of Icarus," the painting in which most of the 16th-
century figures seem unaware or unconcerned by the body of
the Greek boy plummeting from the sky into the sea.
Having reassessed the image in light of all the other less
ambiguous pictures published from that day, he believes
it "has grown in importance." In effect, he has Photoshopped
it in his mind so that it now belongs neatly in a more
contemporary storyline of this nation's culpability for world
unease. The German press has reproduced the photograph
widely and seems to have read it, as Mr. Rich did, to upbraid
Americans for their hedonism and short memories. Funny, but I
don't know many New Yorkers who have moved past 9/11,
certainly none who has done so "fast." Thomas Hoepker may be
the exception. >>>
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