The Voice of the Visual in Memory* For as long as collective memory has been an area of scholarly concern, the precise role of images as its vehicle has been asserted rather than explicated. This article addresses the role of images in collective memory. Motivated by circumstances in which images, rather than words, emerge as the preferred way to establish and maintain shared knowledge from earlier times, it offers the heuristic of "voice" to help explain how images work across represented events from different times and places. The article uses "voice" to elucidate how the visual becomes an effective mode of relay about the past and a key vehicle of memory.
On the Boundaries of Memory
Memory works through the various vehicles that give collectives a sense of their past. Addressed already in the work of Frances Yates, who showed how material artifacts in classical Rome facilitated the capacity to remember, [1] the material object has long been seen as a stand-in or synecdochic representation of larger events, issues and settings. That notion has been elaborated by contemporary scholars, with Paul Connerton, Barry Schwartz, and Jacques Le Goff each underscoring the instrumentality of remembering complex events through vehicles of collective memory. [2] In particular, Pierre Nora's notion of "lieux de memoire," or "sites of memory," has helped demonstrate the linkage between the ability to remember and the places, conceptual and physical, where shared memory is lodged.[3]
This scholarship postulates that different vehicles of memory offer different ways of making sense of the past. From portraits to bodily habits, collective memories take shape at the intersections created by the different vehicles involved, with remembering through public monuments assumed to be a qualitatively different experience than remembering through films.[4] How these vehicles equip publics to remember thereby foregrounds different stress points in the memory work under question. Images are one such vehicle, whose various forms -- portraits, pictures, photographs, films -- constitute a cogent means of tackling the past and making it work for the present. But how we remember through images remains powerfully different from how we might remember the same event were images not involved.
How Images Work
Theories of visual representation have long been occupied with delineating how images work differently than words. Much recent scholarship has been drawn to the place at which words and images meet, arguing that side by side the cogent dimensions of each representational template emerge.[5] Such an intersection has generated similar interest in scholarship on memory, where the entanglement of words and images plays upon the respective representational strengths of each memory vehicle.
Indeed, the value of considering how images work by comparing and contrasting them with words dates back at least to the work of Gotthold Lessing. In his early essay on the Laocoon, he argued that painting differs from poetry simply because it "can use but a single moment of an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow."[6] In other words, the visual, unlike the verbal, might best tell a story by strategically catching things in the middle. It depicts for its onlookers a moment in an event's unfolding to which they attend while knowing where that unfolding leads. This means that visual work often involves catching the sequencing of events or issues midstream, strategically freezing it at its potentially strongest moment of meaningful representation.
This point is crucial for explaining the role of images in memory. It suggests that images help us remember the past by freezing its representation at a powerful moment already known to us. Indeed, Lessing's ideas are particularly interesting because we do not encounter images in contemporary experience devoid of other memory vehicles. Rather, images about the past appear alongside other visuals, words, sounds, and artifacts in an array of settings -- legal discourse, religion, politics, and journalism, to name a few. Individuals and publics thus often know more about the past than what is actually depicted in a given image, perhaps having read of the depicted, seen a different visual representation of it, or even visualized depictions associated with similar mnemonic schemata. An unusual relationship is created between spectator and image, that positions spectators in the peculiar circumstance of knowing more than they see while positioning images between what the spectator knows and does not know. When it comes to viewing images of the past, of which at least some information may be familiar, spectators are thereby led to suspend knowledge so as to encounter the depiction upon spectatorship.
Against this background, theories of visual representation have long held that images work through a combination of two forces. On the one hand, images, particularly photographs, work through a denotative force that is connected with verisimilitude, or the ability of the image to reference things "as they are." Also called the image's indexicality or referentiality, by which an image appears to capture life on its own terms, the power to represent is established through the assumption of a correspondence with real life events. On the other hand, we expect from images a certain connotative force too. Connected with symbolism, generalizeability, and universality, the image in this regard is assumed capable of invoking and repairing to broad symbolic systems that draw on certain meanings for the visual representations that are displayed.[7]
The tension between the denotative and connotative forces of the image has occupied scholars of visual culture for decades. Yet certain theorists of visual culture have remained bewildered by an additional force of the image, which Roland Barthes called its "third meaning."[8] In Barthes' view, the image's third meaning compels viewers after they encounter and deplete both its literal/informational side and its symbolic dimensions. Barthes argued that the third meaning is difficult to locate, because it is not situated structurally or in a certain place of the image. It is similarly difficult to describe, because it involves what he called the image's obtuseness, its accent or anaphoric side. It is thus no surprise that contemporary theories of visual representation generally have left the image's third meaning unexplicated.
It may be that visuals need more than just indicative and symbolic force to work in memory. We know that visual memory uses both indicative and symbolic parameters to assert itself in predictable and patterned linkages to the past.[9] Yet, it is possible that such parameters come together systematically, picking up recurrent visual tropes over time and activating them across different events and places in a way that lends meaning to the recycling typical of memory. In other words, it may be that in memory images need more than their indicative and symbolic dimensions and depend on the successful activation of that third meaning to which Barthes referred.
Photographs and Memory
As vehicles of memory, images work in patterned ways, concretizing and externalizing events in an accessible and visible fashion that allows us to recognize the tangible proof they offer of the events being represented. Images actively depend on their material form when operating as vehicles of memory, with our ability to remember events of the past facilitated by an image's availability and interchangeability. In a sense, then, visual memory's texture becomes a facilitator for memory's endurance.
With photography, this is even more the case, for the force of the photographic image is derived from its powerful capacity to represent the real. Often, photography aids the recall of things and events past so effectively that photographs become the primary markers of memory itself. We need only think of the wide-ranging familiarity of the image of a small boy being herded out of the Warsaw Ghetto by Nazi soldiers to recognize how far a photograph can go in standing in for the event it depicts.
Yet difficulties arise when photographs shape a collective past. At best, photographs are arbitrary, composite, conventionalized and simplified glimpses of the past. They are "conventionalized, because the image has to be meaningful for an entire group; simplifed, because in order to be generally meaningful and capable of transmission, the complexity of the image must be reduced as far as possible."[10] They are also schematic, lacking the detail of the images of personal memory. We do not remember the name of the South Vietnamese village where children ran screaming from their napalmed homes into the field of vision of a photographer's camera, nor the date or circumstances under which the photograph was taken. But its resonance as an image of war atrocity -- and consequent invocation by U.S. anti-war groups during the sixties and seventies -- stabilizes its meaning precisely along its more schematic dimensions. Collectively held images act as signposts within these limitations, providing a frame in which people can collectively appropriate images at the same time as others. That frame directs us to preferred meaning by the fastest if not the most all-encompassing route.
In events as wide-ranging as the Hindenberg explosion and the Challenger disaster, the collective's ability to remember through images depends on some recognized means of storage. For unless cultures have the "means to freeze the memory of the past, the natural tendency of social memory is to suppress what is not meaningful or intuitively satisfying...and substitute what seems more appropriate or more in keeping with their particular conception of the world."[11] Modern culture's capacity to freeze, replay, and store visual memories for large numbers of people -- facilitated by museums, art galleries, television archives, and other visual data banks -- has enhanced our ability to make the past work for present aims. Discussions of photographic memory thereby become at some level discussions of cultural practice -- of the strategies by which photographs are made and collected, retained and stored, recycled and forgotten.
These points of emphasis have moved us substantially in our appreciation of how photographs work in memory. But they have also introduced certain blind spots into our understanding of photographs as vehicles of memory. Scholarship on photographic memory has emphasized the fact and actuality of photographic depiction to such an extent that it has left unaddressed its opposite -- contingency. Defined as the quality of being uncertain, conditional or possible, contingency softens the fact-driven force of the photograph by introducing chance and relativity into its appropriation by spectators.[12] Such "what if" dimensions of the image, however, are largely absent from theories of visual representation. Despite the lexicon that we have begun to develop for some dimensions of visual authority, there is still no term that complicates/modifies/qualifies what we see. Without it, all that contingency entails -- possibility, qualification, imagination -- is pushed aside to accommodate the blunt force of the photograph's depiction of the here and now.
Yet it is possible, even probable, that images function in memory precisely through contingency, when meaning settles not at the image's original point of display but over time in new contexts, contexts that are always altered, sometimes playful, and often contradictory. By playing to the contingent aspect of a depicted event or issue, the image's capacity to speak for the past changes in its relation to the events it depicts. And when dealing with events of a tragic nature, contingency may be the best interpretive stance for which we can hope.
The Subjunctive Voice of Images
"Voice" offers a useful way of making sense of the image's role in memory. Seen here as the dimensions of an image that propel it to link with other events at other times and places, voice helps explain how the image takes on an already provided meaning upon its initial appearance. In this regard, voice can be seen as an assist, that helps us to understand both the image's third meaning and the role of contingency in visual memory.
It is important to note that what is here called "voice" in effect corresponds with a slew of linguistic terms -- including voice, mood, tense, and aspect -- that complicate and qualify the word of action in a statement. While in popular usage voice simply means articulation or statement, voice is defined grammatically as that which shows the relationship between the subject and the word of action in a statement.[13] Taken together, voice is extended here to refer to the relationship developed between the spectator and the image -- involving state of mind, attitude, temporal and sequential positioning -- and to those aspects of the image that help the spectator develop that relationship. This is key, for it offsets the limitations of the image itself. As Slavoj Zizek contended, "voice does not simply persist at a different level with regard to what we see, it rather points to a gap in the field of the visible, toward the dimension of what eludes our gazeultimately, we hear things because we cannot see everything."[14]
Voice helps situate visual memory on the boundaries of the familiar, ensuring not only that new images build upon a visual tradition in both form and content but on a series of related expectations for how we are willing to connect with the past, and where our resistance for doing so can be found. At the same time, voice helps introduce the more amorphous aspects of visual depiction, that are associated with what might be loosely called an image's mood, tense, and aspect.
If we are agreed that the domain of the visual is in need of explication for both an image's third meaning and its connection to contingency, it makes sense to search for a voice that accomplishes that address effectively. One such voice -- the "subjunctive" -- does so particularly well, as it is concerned with the capacity to couch what is represented in an interpretive scheme of "what could be." Grammatically, the subjunctive qualifies the word of action by situating it within the hypothetical, changing the statement "I shot that man" to "I might have shot that man." Usually signified in verbal language by auxiliaries such as "might," "could," or "should," by the substitution of "would have" for "had," and by the use of "if" clauses, depiction in images adds impulses of supposal, hypothesis, and possibility to photographic verisimilitude. The condition under focus is transformed from a reality or future certainty to a probability made possible by someone's desire, emotions, or imagination. Technically defined as the mood of a verb used to express condition or hypothesis, the subjunctive creates a space of possibility, hope, and liminality through which spectators might relate to images. Images that might not be inherently uncertain, hypothetical, or emotional become so due to the attitude of spectators. It allows them to move through what might be called the "as if" of visual representation and memory. The "as if" thrives on contradiction, on often illogical, unpredictable, and idiosyncratic connections, whereby the original use-value of a piece of visual culture is easily negated and undermined. The "as if" has many helpers in photography -- insufficient credits, overgeneralized captions, an imprecise relation between text and image -- all the tools that blur an image's referentiality. In the subjunctive voice, questions about cultural authority are altered and muted, if not suspended. Spectators begin to ask not "what are we looking at?" but "what does this remind us of?" and "what possibilities does this raise?"
As a mode of tackling experience, the subjunctive has been addressed by numerous scholars concerned with meaning and representation. Anthropologist Victor Turner was instrumental in introducing the subjunctive to discussions of everyday life, with his notions about ritual process and liminality.[15] Charles E. Scott, Roger Silverstone, and Michael Schudson each elaborated on the notion in the different contexts of philosophy, cultural studies, and journalism.[16] Yet none considered the role that the subjunctive might play in images and the domain of visual representation.
The subjunctive enhances the work of visual memory because it activates visual markers for subjunctive ends and thereby becomes well-suited for representing complex events. Prominent when the visual retreats into the past, the subjunctive here depends on the texture and availability of images that are simplified, schematic, and often composite and that appear in an interchangeable array of paintings, icons, photographs, and video clips. In memory, the subjunctive voice connects across these dimensions in patterned ways. We come to remember whole events through condensed images that reduce complex and multidimensional phenomena into memorable scenes. Often they are memorable because they activate impulses about how the "world might be" rather than how "it is."
For example, when a depiction pauses on the "as if" dimensions of an image -- coaxing spectators to consider how a depiction "might mean," "might be," "might look," or "might end" -- it involves many sides of the imaginary. A photograph of a kiss, tendered in a public square at the end of World War II, draws imaginary visions of who the people might have been, what kind of relationship they might have had, or where their act might have led. Similarly, a photograph of a flag-raising at the conclusion of a drawn-out battle conjures up thoughts about the flag-raisers' experiences in battle and the world order that their action was hoping to set in place. Each of these examples illustrates what Lessing said about the visual long ago: Images break the sequencing of action in the middle. By freezing that sequencing midway at a particularly memorable representational moment, spectators are able to embellish numerous imaginary schemes on the "about to" moment that is depicted in the sequencing of action. In this sense, they supply a contingent dimension to visual depiction. That contingent dimension, in turn, helps activate the image's third meaning that facilitates connections between images across times and places.
Visualizing the About-To-Die Moment
The possibilities raised here regarding the role of the image in memory -- that it thrives both on the image's third meaning and on its contingent dimensions -- are key to understanding images over time. Yet both possibilities depend on representational decisions that strategically play to the kinds of images that typically emerge as effective vehicles of memory. Such images tend to be of the type described above: they freeze a particularly memorable moment of representation midway through the sequencing of action and they do so by representing it through the subjunctive voice. Typically, then, they build upon the blunt force of photographic depiction -- its concretization of the here and now -- and soften that force with qualifiers that are suggestive of possibility, contingency and hypothesis.
While such images come to the foreground in numerous kinds of visual representation, perhaps nowhere are their attributes as salient as in those visual images that depict individuals on the brink of death. From Phillip Aries, we have learned that the representation of death has long been codified in conjunction with broader notions about how life is supposed to be lived and ended.[17] The work of Jay Ruby has extended our understanding of how people use photographs of loved ones to mitigate the finality of their deaths.[18] Such assumptions play to the subjunctive voice and midway sequencing typical of images in memory. In other words, images of the about-to-die moment offer a content that is well-suited to the form provided by images acting as memory vehicles.
Firstly, the subjunctive voice offers an apt way of depicting the difficult topic of death. It allows us to recognize its finality while facilitating the inclusion of possibility, contingency, and even the illogical conclusion of its postponement. Visual images using the subjunctive voice to address death are thus possibly easier to view.
Secondly, freezing the sequencing of action midway means that these images purport to delay death's progression. Freezing the sequencing midway positions the action at the "about to" moment, the moment at which an individual or group is going to die, but not after they are already dead. By freezing the representation of death before people actually die, we mark the moment before death, rather than after, as the most powerful and memorable moment of representation in the sequencing of events surrounding human demise. And indeed, both the arts and scholarship on the death experience have long held one's final moment as crucially important. Assumed to offer a playback on one's life in which one's entire life flashes by in an instant, individuals are often seen reflecting on personal accomplishments and failures at the moment they are about to die.[19] It is not only a point of transference but a boundary marker of crucial importance that marks significant aspects of all that has come before and all that is to follow.
This is a long way of saying that the moment before death has long been seen as one of the most perplexing, complicated, and interesting moments in contemporary civilization. Seen in many instances as the preferred version of death's representation, the final moment before death can be traced as an enduring trope in one of the classic representations of civilization -- the crucifixion. Although not all portrayals of the crucifixion show an already-dead Christ, a recurrent visual trope has been to depict Christ at the moment of his impending death.[20] In such images, Christ is portrayed as still alive and suffering, rather than already dead, and the moment before his death is positioned as the preferred way of depicting death itself, death's opposite being used as its stand-in.
It is not surprising, then, that the aesthetic choice to frame the one already dead at the moment that the person is about to die has a long history in visual representation. Woodcuts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries -- the artes moriendi that portrayed for the public the proper manner of dying -- used the traditional image of the deathbed and the deathbed scene as the preferred iconographic representation of death.[21] Similarly, numerous paintings from the late 18th and early 19th century reflected the decision to feature the moment before death as the stand-in for death itself.
For instance, a painting by Benjamin West titled "The Death of General Wolfe" portrayed Wolfe's death in the midst of the siege of Quebec, during the French and Indian War. In the painting, West depicted the death of what he saw as the modern hero by portraying a dying Wolfe surrounded by adoring subordinates. Publics here were offered the same tension that had resonated earlier from the crucifixion images, whereby the state of death was visualized by a still-live body. Jacques Louis David chose to portray "The Death of Socrates" in a similar fashion. Despite the image's title, publics saw Socrates sitting upright and busily engaged with everyone around him, all of whom probably wondered when the hemlock he had just swallowed would take effect. The image, painted in 1787, was in keeping with Plato's account of Socrates' death, which maintained that the philosopher died as he lived rather than the other way around. And a few years later, Francesco Goya portrayed the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion by depicting a man stiffened with fear against the firing squad about to end his life. Titled "Third of May, 1808," the scene showed the man's last moment, before being bayoneted by insurgent troops.[22]
In considering the middle captured by each of these paintings, we are reminded again that it is their frozen motion that makes each image so striking, offering us, as Lessing suggested, what may in fact set visual representation and particularly the still moment apart from other modes of representation. Simply put, the image tells the story of what happened at a point just before the end of its unfolding. The power of the images is magnified by the deaths to which they lead, with death built upon to accommodate broader subjunctive messages.
In each case of viewing the about-to-die image, we are drawn into an illogical spectator position that is simultaneously naïve and all-knowing. That all-knowingness coaxes us to review what we know is about to happen and to think about what might have been had things happened differently. We entertain the irrational hope that death may not occur. As Lessing suggested, we are drawn here to what is by knowing what followed, suspending what we know is about to happen. This impossible contradictory stance is facilitated by the mood of contingency made possible by the subjunctive voice. As spectators, then, we are drawn to the "as if" of these representations, left to wonder how things might have looked different had death not occurred. And it is the subjunctive voice -- the stance of contingency -- that persists in memory. The "as if" is what gets recycled -- on posters, collectors' volumes, photographic yearbooks. Subjunctivity, then, becomes a voice or trope through which to remember.
All of this suggests that the aesthetic choice to pitch an image of death as an about-to-die moment has been key. This is important, because it may have emerged as a choice producing a particularly powerful and emotional image of death. Moreover, this moment of about to die plays itself out across a wide range of depictions in culture, journalism among them. Even before the advent of photography in journalism, drawings of about-to-die moments appeared regularly. Among the most well-known examples was an illustration of President William McKinley's assassination in 1901, which a Leslie's magazine artist drew at the moment of McKinley extending his right hand for a handshake with his about-to-be assassin.[23] Once photography became the preferred way of visualizing events in journalism, however, the opportunity for displaying about-to-die moments became more widespread.
Journalism and the About-to-Die Image
The inclusion of the about-to-die image in journalistic representations provides a particularly interesting illustration of the resonance of this particular type of depiction. When journalists include the about-to-die moment as part of their coverage, they in effect subvert journalism's own aims -- which is to present depictions of that which is most newsworthy. What is most newsworthy for journalism is death itself. Yet its depiction may not coincide with that which is most visually powerful, suggesting that a journalist or news organization's decision to attend to the visually powerful in effect neglects that which is newsworthy. When that visually powerful image remains the primary iconic representation of the depicted event over time, questions arise concerning the documentary status of the news image in memory. Moreover, when that depiction uses the subjunctive voice -- the "as if" -- rather than the indicative -- the "as is," on which journalism strongly relies, questions arise too regarding the voice by which journalists typically establish their own authority.
This is no small matter, for photographic depictions of the about-to-die moment have literally cluttered the repository of photojournalism's high moments. Collections of the iconic images of photojournalism have long included versions of the about-to-die moment, where photojournalistic images have focused on the final moment before death, actual or presumed. Such images fill our collective memory: a young boy being herded from the Warsaw Ghetto under a Nazi machinegun, Lee Harvey Oswald about to be gunned down by Jack Ruby, a black man ascending the platform to his own lynching, a Palestinian child crouching in fear before he is shot to death by Israeli soldiers. In each case, the about-to-die moment recurs time and again as a memorable synecdochic stand-in for a range of complex, often contested events in contemporary history.
The about-to-die moment involves two aberrations to journalism. One concerns the violation of journalistic values of newsworthiness at the time of the photograph's initial display, either on the part of the photographer or the news organization, by which the about-to-die photo becomes the preferred way of visualizing the death at hand. In most cases, this decision involves substituting depictions of the about-to-die photograph in place of other more newsworthy images of death itself. In part, such a decision depends on what Jessica Fishman has defined as an inhibition regarding the images of corpses in the news, whereby the about-to-die image is rendered the less offensive choice for journalists to make.[24] The second involves violating journalistic values of newsworthiness over time, whereby the less newsworthy photo, originally selected for initial display, becomes the iconic image by which the complex events surrounding death are remembered. Such photos of the about-to-die moment reappear in news retrospectives, anniversary issues, and other memory work conducted by news organizations over time.[25] Given that many of the events being depicted or remembered involve the tragic death of either large populations or prominent individuals, the selection and maintenance of photos that have been strategically chosen because they depict death in process, rather than as a finished state, is telling.
For instance, three of the four iconic images of the conflict in Vietnam captured individuals poised at the moment of death but not yet dead.[26] Each photo not only received widespread depiction at the time of the event's original unfolding but was recycled extensively over time, reappearing in retrospectives on the VietnamWar, newspaper and broadcast retrospectives of the sixties and seventies, and memorial volumes on South-East Asia. Perhaps the most famous was the memorable Eddie Adams photograph from 1968 of a South Vietnamese chief of national police -- General Loan -- putting a bullet into the brains of a Vietcong prisoner. The picture, one of a sequence of still shots that Adams took at the time, rapidly became a potent symbol of anti-war sentiments and played a crucial role in turning U.S. public opinion against the war. Significantly, Adams shot numerous images of the Vietcong prisoner, already dead, which did not make it widely into print, while the about-to-die moment that he snapped made it onto the front pages of nearly every newspaper across the United States. It appeared twice in one edition of the New York Times, both on the front page and on page 12, bracketed by photos that Adams had taken before and after the execution.[27] The photographer's provision of photographic evidence of the dead prisoner was thus pushed aside to accommodate the about-to-die image, which made the front page of that newspaper and others. In somewhat of a reverse practice, when the shot was shown on NBC Nightly News, the network blacked out its screen for three seconds, thereby increasing the photo's impact.[28] Not surprisingly, the photograph eventually won a Pulitzer, and has since become one of the iconic representations of the Vietnam War.
Perhaps nowhere has the about-to-die moment been as aptly represented as in the visuals of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Because the World Trade Center attack occurred in the midst of the nation's media capital, the New York Times felt that camera crews and news photographers "all had ample time to capture the most horrific moments."[29] Yet images of human death did not generally appear, other than one photo of a severed hand that appeared in the New York Daily News.[30] Depictions of body parts, blood, and gore were generally nowhere to be found. Possibly due to the trauma caused by the scope of the tragedy, depicting the loss of human life at a point before life was lost seemed to be simply easier than depicting death itself. It also reflected a longstanding reluctance, identified by Fishman, to depict images of human gore in the press and a tendency to target instead other focal points, such as inanimate objects or live bodies.[31] Hence, news executives admitted that video footage and photography of body parts were excised from public view. MSNBC's president said that his staff pushed aside numerous pictures showing blood and body parts to find the more antiseptic images. "We chose not to show a lot," he said. "How more horrifying and graphic can you get than a 110-story building, blowing up and disintegrating before your eyes?"[32] In other words, the about-to-die moment took precedence as a trope of visual representation from the beginning.
Nonetheless, the depictions that appeared in the days following the attacks were met with incredulity. As Business Week advised its readers:
Close your eyes and try to make the images go away -- the jagged holes ripped in the twin towers by two hijacked airliners, desperate office workers jumping to their deaths, the buildings' eventual cascading collapse, scenes of panic in the streets, jumpy TV footage of injured Pentagon officers. You can't banish the horror.[33]Photographs connected to the attacks, though not depicting bodies, appeared with a systematic regularity that bordered at times on excess. Even by year's end, the same images continued to be displayed because, in the New York Times' view, "they freeze-frame a calamity so great that the mind struggles, even months later, to comprehend the data being sent by the eyes."[34]
The about-to-die depictions of September 11 had two photographic focal points: ill-focused shots of people about to die and images of the burning World Trade Center buildings, filled with individuals who were not visualized but poised in an imaginary or presumed space on the brink of death. These two sides of death's depiction -- a first order image depicting actual people on way to their death and a second order image depicting their presumed death in the buildings on way to their collapse -- were shown in complementary but different ways. It makes sense to consider them in turn.
First Order About-To-Die Photos
The images of people on the way to their deaths in the World Trade Center provided a particularly horrific example of the force of photographic depiction, that constituted a first order representation of the about-to-die moment. Pictures of still-live bodies leaning from upper-story windows or tumbling from skyscrapers constituted a set of perhaps the most tragic depictions displayed in the aftermath of the attacks. Reminiscent of an earlier image in which people in a clothing factory gestured hysterically at bystanders from inside a fiery warehouse and jumped rather than burn to death,[35] these photos were nonetheless shocking for the magnitude of the loss of human life that they represented. Moreover, the pictures of people waving frantically as fire engulfed the buildings or jumping to certain deaths were particularly painful because they underscored the sheer hopelessness of both the people trapped inside and the people witnessing their demise.
Images of people about to die appeared first on television. During the first few hours after the attacks, certain broadcast and cable news organizations -- CNN, Fox News, and CBS -- initially showed moving images of people jumping from the center towers' upper floors to their presumed deaths on the pavement below. These pictures, which portrayed bodies like unreal stick figures tumbling jerkily into the gray sky from the side of the buildings, represented but did not depict actual death. No bodies were shown striking the pavement below, and little visual detail of those about to die was offered. The photographs were peculiar for the long view of action that they offered and for their failure to depict faces, identifiable human features, or detailing of clothing. At the same time, the distance between the photographers and camera-people, on the one hand, and the individuals on the towers' upper floors, on the other, made certain that the people remained anonymous and would not be recognized by relatives.[36] Spectators, instead, were expected to expand upon the brutal fact of anonymous falling bodies with the presumption of their impending death on the pavement below. In a sense, then, these images, that aptly captured the horror of the attack as it unfolded, depended already at their original depiction on the spectator to fill in the narrative of a gruesome death beyond that actually depicted. Significantly, however, the image in its moving version was pulled from the television screen almost immediately after its initial broadcast. Both ABC and MSNBC decided not to show it at all, with executives at both news organizations wondering whether it was "necessary to show people plunging to their death."[37] NBC showed an image of one person jumping once and then pulled it, because, in one executive's view, it was "disturbing."[38] Although the image continued to be shown on some foreign broadcast networks, such as the BBC, on the home front it was deemed inappropriate and taken off-air.
Yet the images of people jumping and hanging out of the towers experienced a peculiar short-life in the press, that underscored the power of the subjunctive in helping people deal with the World Trade Center attacks. Two particular images made a comeback the day after the attack, when they were relegated as still photographs to the inner pages of certain daily newspapers. An Associated Press photograph of a solitary person tumbling headfirst out of the buildings, taken in two versions by Richard Drew, was reprinted more widely than other images of people about to die. [INSERT IMAGE 1 HERE]. The jumper, his legs poised as if in a graceful dance position, was depicted plummeting straight down the sides of the building. The image appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on an inside page, under the matter-of-fact title "A person falls from the World Trade Center's north tower," alongside a much larger picture of a jetliner lining up to fly into one of the World Trade Center towers.[39] It also appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post, where it was appended to an article pondering why people had chosen to jump. [40] A differently angled version of the same shot was displayed in the New York Times and also the Washington Post.[41] Time labelled it "The Long Fall."[42]
A second image, taken by Reuter's Jeff Christiensen, was also reprinted widely in the first day or two after the attacks. The photograph showed people hanging out of the World Trade Center, waving frantically. [INSERT IMAGE 2 HERE]. Although Christiensen did not realize at first that his much larger shot of the building included in one corner scores of people caught between death by fire and death by jumping, the wire service blew the smaller image, constituting 1/50 of the original frame, into its own image once alerted to its contents. The picture appeared twice in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek and the Boston Globe.[43] Typically, it received a caption that generalized the depicted scene: Newsweek called it "After the Blast."[44]
The images' immediate display in the press at first raised the question of how the photographic still image could suddenly make the horrific display presentable. Why did the image of people jumping, considered too powerful and inappropriate when positioned as part of a video sequence, become appropriate for public display a mere 24 hours later, when transformed into a single, static shot? Those questions, however, were quelled by the fact that the static shots of people about to die reappeared in only a limited fashion.
Despite a short run in the press during the first day or two after the attacks, the photos did not proliferate widely. They were printed in only a limited number of newspapers, primarily New York papers and newspapers of record.[45] When they did appear, they were printed on inside rather than front pages, and more often than not in black and white rather than color.[46] Finally, when they did run, they provoked reader complaints.[47]
By the weekend, the images of people about to die virtually disappeared, appearing in very few of the newsmagazines, retrospectives or other overviews of that first week's events.[48] By the time that many of the later retrospective volumes went into print three months later, they reappeared hardly at all. One memorial volume comprised nearly one hundred photos but not one portrayed the tumbling bodies.[49] Even an Associated Press retrospective, issued in September of 2001, did not include the photograph of a solitary jumper taken by its own photographer.[50]
The contradictory display of the static shot -- by which it appeared but without full force -- is telling. On the one hand, its appearance could have been expected to be short-lived, given the reluctance in the press about showing human gore.[51] On the other, the reappearance of the about-to-die moment as a still shot offered a more subjunctive and contingent display of the image than was suggested in the image's moving version. While most spectators within a day or two were able to fill in the tragic details of the larger narrative -- the fact that beyond the camera's frame lay the harsh pavement on which the bodies landed -- there was little in the images themselves that forced spectators to face that aspect of the event. Rather, the static depictions allowed them to remain in a subjunctive space even longer than they had with the moving image. In that subjunctive space, the people portrayed were not yet dead and the depiction suggested the remote possibility that perhaps, as in one spectator's words, it was "all just a bad dream."[52] As one ABC news correspondent said, "the most horrible thing was the sight of people hurling themselves from the building. I was telling myself maybe they weren't real people. They looked like little dolls."[53]
The tug of these two contradictory impulses facilitated the images' disappearance and brief return. However, the no-nonsense positioning of the bodies, some of them tumbling headfirst as they fell from the buildings, made it difficult to contain a subjunctive interpretation for long. What possibilities -- other than certain death -- could be entertained here? So bothered was the New York Times by the image that it ran an article detailing journalistic decisions to run the picture of jumping bodies.[54] While the Times justified its decision to publish because the photo appeared on an inside page and in black and white and Newsday justified it because it was a small image and the person unidentifiable, this was not enough for some readers.[55] As one wrote to the Denver Post, "this is nauseatingDo you have no feelings, no sense of respect for the families of the loved ones lost?"[56]
Thus, the portrayals of jumping bodies disappeared a second time. In need of a visualization that could powerfully convey the tragic events as they unfolded, a second order about-to-die moment emerged from the scores of photos being taken. It depicted the more imaginary or presumed aspect of impending death as embodied in the collapse of the World Trade Center itself. In other words, images of the buildings in which people were about to perish took the place of depictions of people themselves about to die.
Second Order About-To-Die Photos
Depictions of the buildings upheld a tendency in the press, identified by Fishman, to offset the visualization of dead bodies with a focus on inanimate objects.[57] But the buildings here took on a central role in visualizing the tragedy for a grieving public from the very beginning. Played over and over again on television, in newsmagazines, and in other venues of visual display, the towers provided a remarkable shot of impact that segmented the larger story neatly into before and after portions. At times the images seemed to function like "a kind of wallpaper."[58] And yet, the repeated display of the shots helped offset people's persistent disbelief in what was happening. In MSNBC anchor Brian Williams' words, "it just never ceases to amaze people to watch that piece of videotape."[59]
But as an about-to-die photo, the image of the fractured World Trade Center, its towers burning shortly before their monumental demise, had an additional function. It forced spectators to imagine or presume the precise circumstances of the individuals who faced their deaths rather than see the individuals as they were about to die. In much the same way that the moving images of jumping bodies offered less of an ability to pause subjunctively than did the still shots, so too the depiction of bodies offered less of a subjunctive space than did the inanimate buildings. Choosing to depict buildings over bodies prolonged the moment of contingency in which spectators could improbably hope that the buildings would not fall and the people not die. As one spectator said, "I kept looking and looking and wishing that the story would take a different turn."[60] Or, as a New York Times columnist commented on a moment in which the tape of the just-struck buildings played backwards momentarily, "we saw history reverse itself; the building appeared whole, as if in a wishful dream."[61]
These photos portrayed the looming facades of the twin towers in various stages of their demise. [INSERT FIGURE 3 HERE] Certain photos showed them at the moment of impact of one or the other airliner; others showed them on fire after the planes struck; still others showed them as they began to crumble. The front pages of some newspapers elected to show a series of temporal moments of the building crumbling in sequenced succession.[62] Each depiction was an additional variance of the about-to-die moment, with spectators recognizing that the thousands of live people inside were experiencing horrific and life-threatening circumstances at the moment of the images' depiction.
The same images were shown repeatedly over the next few days. The day after the attacks, the burning towers appeared on nearly every front page of the U.S. and foreign newspapers.[63] In viewing the images by that point, spectators clearly were forced to suspend what they knew -- that the towers did in fact come down, killing all those still trapped inside. Yet the image persisted. The Philadelphia Inquirer, for instance, used the burning towers as its logo for days after the attacks, as a way of marking its daily inventory of the attack-related articles inside the newspaper.[64]
The burning towers were also seen in nearly every possible visual venue beyond the front pages of newspapers. They appeared on the covers of all of the major newsmagazines and as logos for most televised broadcast and cable coverage of the aftermath of the attacks.[65] The towers adorned the covers of retrospective memorial volumes over the months that followed.[66] The cover of Newsweek's double year-end issue featured an overview of the year with the single word "September" affixed above a picture of the burning towers.[67] On December 31, the image topped a special New York Times section, entitled "The Year in Pictures."[68] Not only did the towers appear on many volume covers but also on inside pages in the same volumes: a Reuters commemorative volume designated 10% of its over 130 photos to the burning towers.[69] Additionally, the images were affixed to numerous popular cultural artifacts, including calendars, buttons, tee-shirts, and posters.[70]
Yet there is need to ask why these images stuck in memory. Why did the burning towers persist as the reigning about-to-die moment of the September 11 attacks? It is probable that the images reigned as the preferred way of making sense of the attacks, because they had the right "voice" for displaying the horror associated with the World Trade Center attacks. Not only did the images offer the appropriate degree of contingency for a message too harsh to be seen with the brute force of reality's depiction. As one spectator, trying to take his own photograph of the towers before they collapsed, wrote in the New York Times: "It had been a nice shot. And certainly it had been easier to shape the horror into an aesthetic distance and deny the human reality. There was safety in that distance."[71] But the image also cut -- and depicted -- the story at precisely its most powerful moment, pushing spectators to recognize what came later while allowing them to prolong the experience of what had been before. The images hence created a space of (im)possibility, whereby spectators were able to linger in a moment when the full scope of the tragedy was not yet upon them.
Conclusion: When Memory Freezes On Contingency
The substitution of buildings for people as the preferred representation of the about-to-die moment in the World Trade Center attacks makes sense when considering the role of the subjunctive in the popular imagination. Viewing the raw horror of bodies tumbling to their death was clearly problematic because their harsh depiction overwhelmed the subjunctive possibility of muting the finality of death for viewers. The buildings, by contrast, prolonged that subjunctive response, softening the reality of the response with the improbable, but comforting, sense that time might have thwarted death's intention.
It is important to realize that the contradictory display associated with these images was resolved by drawing from a robust tradition of earlier about-to-die photos, where death was actual or presumed. Not a decision made on the backs of this event alone, the trajectory by which horrific tragedy came to be visualized through its "as if" rather than its "as is" dimensions has a long history connecting this event with other similar ones -- wars, assassinations, natural tragedies, terrorist acts. The image's voice made available the parallels, making clear which filters were acceptable for drawing death's representation in the public sphere. Voice offered spectators the space of contingency for as long as they needed to be there, postponing the logical conclusion of the about-to-die image -- death itself.
Significantly, however, as we have seen through the long and resonant tradition of such images, the about-to-die representation does not disappear as we move into memory and into what should be a gradual acceptance of the horror of its underlying events. Despite its strategic representativeness for certain kinds of public events, when it it invoked the about-to-die moment lingers as a marker of complex events in history. It persists in manifold forms, turning in journalism into prize-winning photos, celebrated images, and even iconic representations that become, in one newspaper's words "defining statements of the events from which they have arisen."[72] This means that a subjunctive response to the horrors they embody persists too, lingering as messages of contingency at a point where contingency may no longer be the optimum response to the events of mass destruction depicted in these images.
All of this should give us pause. For the powerful presence of the subjunctive within our capacity to remember the past suggests that we often willingly engage in a kind of irrational game-playing with what we see, projecting altered ends on the screens through which we see. The "as if" permeates the core of our very encounters with the real world, moulding our capacity to remember long after it may have outlived its usefulness. Often "we see" because "we should see." But our leap into the third meaning of the image, into an embrace of conditionality and hypothesis, is worth pondering, for what it suggests about the boundaries of memory. For it may be that memory rests not only upon the boundaries of the familiar but upon the boundaries of the impossible. And when dealing with the memory of tragic events, we need to ask ourselves if that is the best response we can muster.
© Barbie Zelizer 2002
NOTES* This article began as parts of a keynote address for a conference on Visual Rhetoric in Bloomington, Indiana and parts of a talk given at a conference on Framing Memory at Syracuse University (both in September 2001). Thanks go to Barbara Biesecker, John Lucaites, and Kendall Phillips for organizing my participation; to Roger Abrahams, Larry Gross, and Amy Jordan for critiquing drafts of my ideas; and to Bethany Klein for research assistance.). [back]
1. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). [back]
2. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989); Barry Schwartz, "The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory," Social Forces 61, no. 2 (1982): 347-402; Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (Columbia, 1992). ). [back]
3. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory (Columbia, 1997-2000). [back]
4. I have discussed this in Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago, 1998) and Barbie Zelizer, "Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies," Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12, no. 2 (June 1995): 214-39. Also see Barbie Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust (Rutgers, 2001). [back]
5. See, for instance, W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1994). [back]
6. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon (Noonday Press, 1961), 92. [back]
7. See Stuart Hall, "The Determinations of News Photographs." In Stanley Cohen and Jock Young (Eds.), The Manufacture of News (Sage, 1974). Also see Allan Sekula, "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning." In Photography Against the Grain (Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photography and History (MacMillan, 1988). [back]
8. Roland Barthes, "The Third Meaning," Image/Music/Text (Hill and Wang, 1977), 52-68. [back]
9. See, for instance, Zelizer, 1998; Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories (University of California Press, 1997); Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall, Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memorials, and the American Hero (Harvard University Press, 1991). [back]
10. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Basil Blackwell, 1992), 47-48. [back]
11. Fentress and Wickham, 58-59. [back]
12. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989). Also see Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Verso Press, 2000). [back]
13. This definition is paraphrased from Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary. Also see Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (PUB, DATE). [back]
14. Slavoj Zizek, "I Hear You With My Eyes," in Renata Salaci and Slavoj Zizek (Eds.), Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Duke University Press, 1996), 93. [back]
15. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). Also see Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960). [back]
16. Charles E. Scott, The Time of Memory (State University of New York, 1989). Says Scott: "The subjunctive mood belongs to states of affairs in which incompletion and contingency, something not stately or directly statable, are joined with statement and fact" (279). Roger Silverstone, Why Study the Media? (Sage Publications, 1999). Michael Schudson, CHAPTER, in Robert Manoff and Michael Schudson (eds.), Reading the News (Pantheon, 1986).
17. Phillippe Aries, Western Attitudes Toward Death (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Also see Aries, The Hour of Our Death (Oxford University Press, 1981). [back]
18. Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (MIT Press, 1995). [back]
19. Aries, 1981, 106. Literature, cinema, and theater abound with representations structured around the about-to-die moment. One recent example is the acclaimed play Wit. [back]
20. See Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: The Spectacle of Punishment in Medireview and Renaissance Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1999). [back]
21. Aries, 1974, 34. [back]
22. Benjamin West, "Death of General Wolfe," 1770; Jacques Louis David, "The Death of Socrates," 1787; Francesco Goya, "Third of May, 1808," 1814. [back]
23. The picture appeared in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Date right after 6 September 1901, PAGE. Also see Murat Halstead, The Illustrious Life of William McKinley, Our Martyred President (Union Publishing House, 1901). Admittedly, first reports maintained that McKinley, who did not die for over a week, would recover from the assassination attempt, so that the initial display of this about-to-die image was in fact an indicative reflection of affairs. However, the image persisted even after his death. [back]
24. See Jessica M. Fishman, "Pictures of Pain: Photojournalistic News Norms and Metaphors of Distress," in Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz and Jay Ruby (eds.), Image Ethics in the Digital Age (University of Minnesota Press, in press). Also see Jessica M. Fishman, Documenting Death: Photojournalism and Spectacles of the Morbid in the Tabloid and Elite Newspaper (Ph.D Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2001). [back]
25. I have discussed these two modes of interpretation as a distinction between the local and the durational. See Barbie Zelizer, "Journalists As Interpretive Communities," Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 10, no. 3 (September 1993). [back]
26. Other than the Eddie Adams shot discussed below, these included the photo of a Buddhist monk self-immolating himself and a group of women and children about to be shot in My Lai. When the former picture reached editorial desks, questions were raised about whether to print it. One Syracuse editor went on record saying, "If you can publish a picture of the crucifixion, you can publish this picture." See Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography (Abbeville Publishing, 1991), 212. [back]
27. Eddie Adams, "Shooting of General Loan." Associated Press, 1968. [back]
28. Goldberg, 226. [back]
29. Jim Rutenberg and Felicity Barringer, "The Ethics: News Media Try to Sort Out Policy on Graphic Images," New York Times, 13 September 2001, A24. [back]
30. New York Daily News, 12 September 2001, PAGE. [back]
31. Fishman, 2001. [back]
32. Erik Sorensen, cited in Rutenberg and Barringer, A24. [back]
33. "Terror in America," Business Week, 24 September 2001, p. 35. [back]
34. Andy Grundberg, "Photography," New York Times Book Review, 2 December 2001, p.35. Indeed, the number of photos that circulated was enormous, suggesting that public response to the tragedy was shaped by using photography to bear witness in a manner set up in 1945 following the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. For more on this, see Barbie Zelizer, "Photography, Journalism, and Trauma," in Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan (eds.), Journalism After September 11 (Routledge, 2002 in press) and Barbie Zelizer, "Finding Aids to the Past: Bearing Personal Witness to Traumatic Public Events," Media, Culture and Society, April 2002, in press. [back]
35. The earlier incident, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, occurred in 1911. Approximately fifty people jumped from the building to their deaths. [back]
36. When interviewed, a Fox News Channel cameramen became teary when he described filming people jumping from the towers. "I stopped," he said, "but I saw 25 more jumping, holding hands, in groups" (Rob Ginnane quoted in "Behind the Camera," TV Guide, 29 September - 5 October, 2001, 15. [back]
37. David Westin, President of ABC News, cited in Rutenberg and Barringer, A24. [back]
38. Bill Wheatley, Vice-President of NBC News, cited in Rutenberg and Barringer, A24. [back]
39. The photo appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, 12 September 2001, p. A14. [back]
40. The photo appeared in the Chicago Tribune on 12 September 2001, A12. It was appended to Gene Weingarten and David Von Drehle, "A Death Better Than Fate's," Washington Post, 13 September 2001, C1. [back]
41. The photo appeared in the New York Times, 12 September 2001, p. A12. Pictures of the burning towers appeared on both pages A1 and A8. The photo appeared in the Washington Post on 12 September 2001, p. A8. A slightly different photo of people jumping, taken by Getty Images, appeared in the Los Angles Times, 12 September 2001, A13. [back]
42. Time, special September 11 edition, n.p. [back]
43. Reuters was alerted to the people in the shot by a European subscriber who noticed small incongruous blobs on the original larger print. See Valerie Basheda, "An Unforgettable Picture," American Journalism Review, October 2001, 27. The photo appeared in the Boston Globe, 12 September 2001, A8; the Chicago Tribune, 12 September 2001, A12; the Washington Post, both on 12 September 2001, A16 and on 13 September, C3. [back]
44. Newsweek, 24 September 2001, Special Report, n.p. [back]
45. See Alice Tugend, "The Simple Act of Getting to Work was An Ordeal," American Journalism Review, October 2001, p. 25. The newspapers which ran the photograph included The New York Times, the Detroit News, Newsday, the Denver Post, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Washington Post included a front-page discussion of the bodies jumping (Barton Gellman, "I Saw Bodies Falling Out - Oh God, Jumping, Falling," Washington Post, 12 September 2001, A1), but the accompanying picture depicted two grieving women holding each other. The Reuters photo of people hanging out of the towers appeared on A16. [back]
46. In one widespread collection of the front pages of newspapers the day after the attacks, not one of 122 national papers showed an image of people about to die on their front pages. See Poynter Institute, September 11, 2001: A Collection of Newspaper Front Pages Selected by the Poynter Institute (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2001). The only newspapers which printed such images on the front page were foreign: Mexico City's El Universal showed the Reuters photo of people hanging out of buildings (12 September 2001, p. A1) and Rio de Janeiro's O Dia showed the AP photo of a man falling headfirst to his death, under the caption "desperado" (12 September 2001, p. A1). [back]
47. See Tugend. Also see Rutenberg and Barringer, A24. [back]
48. The image did appear in Newsweek, 24 September 2001, as a double page spread (n.p.) and a different photo, taken by a photographer for Getty Images, appeared in Time's special issue on September 11. But the image of people jumping did not appear in the regular issues of Time, Business Week, People, In These Times. [back]
49. Magnum Photographers, New York: September 11, 200; In the Line of Duty (Regan Books, 2001); and Reuters, September 11: A Testimony. In the Reuters volume, the Jeff Christiensen shot of people hanging out of the windows was included (p. 13). [back]
50. World Wide Photography and Associated Press, Day of Terror (America Products Publishing Company, 2001). [back]
51. Fishman, 2001. [back]
52. Anonymous comment made at a public viewing of television coverage, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 11 September 2001. [back]
53. Don Dahler, quoted in "Ground Zero," TV Guide, 29 September - 5 October, 39. [back]
54. See Rutenberg and Barringer. [back]
55. Rutenberg and Barringer, A24; Tugend, 25. By contrast, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a column entitled "The Most Horrific Images," in which it did not mention the bodies at all. [back]
56. Cited in Rutenberg and Barringer, A24. [back]
57. Fishman, 2001. [back]
58. Deborah Potter, "It Isn't Over," American Journalism Review, November 2001. 76. [back]
59. Quoted in "Terror Hits Home," TV Guide, 29 September - October 5, 2001, p. 10. [back]
60. Personal communication with author. [back]
61. Caryn James, "Live Images Make Viewers Witnesses to Horror," New York Times, 12 September 2001, A25. [back]
62. Such a representational template, in which sequenced shots showed the buildings being struck by the airplanes and then lit on fire on their way to collapse, was fairly common. The sequence appeared on the front pages of the Los Angeles Times, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Sacramento Bee, the Arizona Republic, The Tennessean, the Denver Post, and the Dallas Morning News, among others. [back]
63. In one widespread collection of front pages the day after the attacks, the burning towers appeared in nearly 85 percent of the newspapers displayed. See Poynter Institute, September 11, 2001. [back]
64. The logo stopped appearing in the newspaper on 16 September, at which point a similar image of the burning towers appeared on an internal page (24). [back]
65.The burning towers tended to appear on both the covers and multiple internal pages of the popular press. For instance, they appeared on the cover of In These Times and again on pages 9 and 10(In These Times, 15 October 2001); on the cover of TV Guide, under the title "Terror Hits Home," TV Guide, 29 September - 5 October, 2001, and again on three internal pages (8-9, 10 and 18); the cover of Business Week, under the title "Act of War," Business Week, 24 September 2001 and again internally on page 34; on the cover of People, under the title "September 11, 2001:The Day That Shook America," People, 24 September 2001, and again on pages 6-7. [back]
66 They included the covers of Magnum Photos, New York: September 11, 2001 (Powerhouse Books, 2001); World Wide Photos and Associated Press, Day of Terror; Editors of New York Magazine, September 11, 2001: A Record of Tragedy, Heroism, and Hope (Henry N. Abrams, 2001); Ethan Casey (ed.), 9:11 8.48 A.M.: Documenting America's Greatest Tragedy (Booksurge.com, 2001). [back]
67. Cover, Newsweek, 31 December 2001-7 January 2002. [back]
68. "The Year in Pictures," New York Times, 31 December 2001, section G. [back]
69. Reuters, September 11: A Testimony (Pearson Education, 2002). Also see Day of Terror and Magnum Photos, New York: September 11, 2001. In the latter, of the nearly 100 photos, 20 portrayed the burning or smoking towers. In a mnemonic pattern that was common to the memorial volumes, another 12 portrayed the towers before 11 September. [back]
70. Some examples included World Trade Center 2002 Memorial Wall Calendar (Brown Trout Publishers); Heroes 2002 Wall Calendar (Brown Trout Publishers); American 911: We Will Never Forget (VHS Tape Set). [back]
71.Colson Whitehead, "The Image," New York Times Magazine, 23 September 2001, p. 21. [back]
72. Richard Edward Larsen, "Did Palestinian Boy Die in Vain?" Ventura County Star, 5 October 2000, B9. [back]
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