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Check out WatchingtheChanges-- it's a beautiful set of WTC skyline shots taken from the East Village. Scroll right to see pictures of the Trade Center-- before, during, and after the attacks. A poster of the same shots is also available. [Related: NYC Bloggers still maintains their authoritative 9-11 post page, with quite a few 9-11 photoblog entries. Gothamist wasn't around in 2001, but we did snap a few polaroids for Bluejake, the forerunner of this site.]
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Should the word "beautiful" have been used? Really, think before you post.
'Beautiful' is not the word.
'Still horrifying' is more appropriate...
www.forgotten-ny.com
What's wrong with you?!..."beautiful"??? People were dying in the moments those photos were taken, remember?
Beautiful? That is one fucked up sense of beautiful. Nothing about that day was beautiful. It was probably the most horrific day of my life.
well they are pretty damn beautiful
I agree. I think that was an extremely insensitive adjective to use.
I think he probably meant that they were beautiful photographs in terms of quality, not in terms of subject...
I've wrestled with the beauty issue myself. There have been some stunning photos taken post 9/11 that I can only call "beautiful."
I live 2 blocks from Ground Zero. When you see all those people taking pictures of the hole in the ground, some of them are carefully composing their shots for maximum impact, to catch the light just so, to heighten the pathos and power of the scene. What are they doing but turning something horrible into something aesthetically pleasing?
One can be struck by both beauty and horror at the same time. That's part of the complexity of the human experience.
dobkin, you are an idiot. some impressions should be kept inside your little head.
even the ny post has more sensitivity.
maybe "eerily beautiful" would have been a better choice of words and would not have set off a flame war.
Is that you sticking your head in front of the towers in those pictures like so damn tourist?
What a douche.
Dictionary.com says:
"beau·ti·ful
adj.
Having qualities that delight the senses, especially the sense of sight.
Excellent; wonderful."
Hmm...yea, do these photos of burning buildings with people trapped inside have qualities that delight my senses? Um, no.
Are they excellent? Not so much.
Wonderful? Don't be fucking ridiculous.
I'm disgusted by your word choice here.
dis·gust
dis·gust·ed, dis·gust·ing, dis·gusts
To excite nausea or loathing in; sicken.
To offend the taste or moral sense of; repel.
Rikomatic,
I have issues w/people even taking pics of the 'hole in the ground,' period. Cause that's why their able to do it, it'a a historical hole in the ground to them. Long term NYers & victim's families see something else entirely.
I took pics from my roof from on 9/11 after hearing the crash, but I had no idea what the fuck was going on & thought it was the end of the world. I still haven't even developed that roll!
About a month later I went down to the WTC & there was a police officer working there yelling at tourists who were taking pictures of the rubble/hole. He was like: "You're taking pictures of a cemetary! This is a cemetary, does that make you feel good to have a souvenier?!, etc." I'm sure he didn't care that some of them were "carefully composing their shots for maximum impact...to heighten the pathos and power of the scene."
I started crying because I felt the same way & then a crane came & knocked down that last 20 ft piece of the side of the tower that had been warped & wedged into the ground. I never considered bringing a camera with me that day before I left my apartment.
Jake, the wound is not healed. Some Gothamist readers have family that died there.
Ah poor Jake - always three seconds away from eating your own foot. Look - totally with you on the "beautiful" thing. The pictures are, doubtless, beautiful in of themselves. Beautiful pictures. The content, however, horrifying. It's a delicate balance that you should have been more sensitive to for the sake of your more priggish or genuinely affected readers. Reminds me of sitting in 1020 on Amsterdam on 9/12 with the footage playing on the TV s while we drank. An Philosopher of aesthetics friend of mine commented that the terrorists couldn't have been total savages as they quite consciously created arresting, engrosing, hauntingly beautiful images as a means of terror. Had the 9/11 been a less photogenic event, she reasoned, it would not have had the severe physic impact on people that had not lost loved ones that it did. We all argeed with her point - though we also agreed that she shouldn't say it out loud too often.
Gabe,
Please tell your Chomsky-wannabe Columbia thick-rimmed-glasses and 'so NYC' friend to get a f*cking clue.
And Jake, that word choice is plain piss-poor, regardless of what some holier-than-thou intellectual pontificates.
The choice of words is transcendentally callous and insensitive. The pictures themselves are interesting, but would they still be as interesting of the WTC burning in the background were not there? Probably not?
I think the outrage some feel might have been abetted by the addition of the sentence along the lines of:
"While the wounds of 9-11 still scar us, WatchingTheChanges.com offers a differnt--and poigniant--perspective on the events of that tragic day."
Art and photography nowadays has an intense fascination with death, destruction and decay. And the main atraction of this pictures is death and decay. Nothing more. Nothing less. To introduce this site--and it's pictures--with the word "beautiful" is bone-headed and confrontational without value.
"Gothamist wasn't around in 2001, but we did snap a few polaroids for Bluejake, the forerunner of this site."
* ooh! we were there! we were there! *
congrats. you are very cool.
La Leone -
I know where you're coming from, being uncomfortable with tourists visiting, taking pictures, buying souvineers, etc. I was down here on 9/11 and have been here just about every day since then and have gone through a variety of feelings about the tourism.
Ultimately, I think it's understandable that people want to come and try to personally connect with the site. For some this means taking pictures, for some it means leaving flowers or a note on a temporary wall, for a few it means spreading crazy propaganda to whoever is within earshot. Given how large the event figures in the national psyche it's only natural for people to try to get closer to it. (And while it may be solemn ground it is no longer a cemetary.) As long as people are respectful of the site and people around them I think they should be free to visit without being criticized or belittled.
Now, to the post: The word "beautiful" seems intentionally used to get a raise out of the readers, persumably so Jake can feel superior to everyone else, predicatably complaining about their inability to appreciate aesthetic beauty in a photograph that depicts the murder of 3,000 people. Very mature and unfortunately about what I've come to expect from Gothamist.
I'm with Jake on this one. Photojournalism appeals to me for the precise reasons that everyone is decrying Jake's word choice. Aesthetic beauty in the midst of crushing horror. Lots of gorgeous work comes out of tragedy.
Swap the word "Beautiful" with "Extraordinary" or "Engrossing" or "Vivid" or "Powerful" etc. It would get the meaning across, without sounding like an idiot. It's a simple edit.
Lawlz @ the Noobkin. Again. Posts like this are here to remind us of the reasons why the name Dobkin has become synonymous with the cause of Pangaean Transdouchery.
Were you born a douche, or was there some ceremony with slaughtered sheep and rhythmic chanting to induct you into the Order?
On another note, wish my friend JJ a Happy Birthday - he continued being dead on February 13th. I guess he died for your Art, Noobkin.
Tasteless and thoughtless wording. I didn't lose anyone that day, but I was across Liberty St. in Deutsche Bank at 8:30 am. I'm not one who thinks we can't discuss what happened that day unless speaking in reverent whispers -- but my gut feeling when I saw this entry was cold disgust. I had to look again to see that yes, you were talking about the WTC as it burned. It's not hard to believe Gothamist wasn't here in 2001; it's hard to believe that you were and could still say such a thing. Was it all just fucking TV to you?
Why hasn't Jake responded here? I guess he doesn't believe in having a CONVERSATION with his readers. That's arrogant, rude, and classless. To publicly ignore the complaints is at best a customer service bitch slap but ultimately it's an insult to the wives of dead firemen.
Jake and Jen are the Twin Towers of Idiocy and we'd all be better off if someone rammed airplanes into them.
how the hell could you call that beautiful???
if this is for the hype, or just plain stupidity, this is disturbing.
Its a free Country.....
He can call the attack pics beautiful and I can remove Gothamist from my blogroll, stop referring friends to it and get my news somewhere else.
"Dobkin has become synonymous with the cause of Pangaean Transdouchery."
Couldn't have said it better myself! Couldn't agree more.
I've always thought Columbia did a poor job of educating young people on discretion and careful selection of words (ever met a Columbia J-School grad? 'nuff said). But there is a wry sort of irony in Jake for once managing to hold his tongue while being vilified. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Of course, a copy editor might have headed off this entire affair -- which has brought us the entire panoply of 9/11 bathos: NYPD-FDNY praise name check, close friend death shout out, intellectual rationalizing by erudite, ennui filled uptowner, I was closer than all of you testimony; all we are missing is a strident denounciation from a family member -- or did I miss that post?
Question for the commentors -
Did any of you fast-to-type-slow-to-look fuckwits notice that for the first groupings of shots the WTC is perfectly intact? That the shots ARE beautiful and become horrifyingly haunting ONLY AFTER they are destroyed??
Why don't you leave Jake alone. At least he, unlike each of you, chose to OPEN his eyes.
While the impact of the art piece would have been dramatically different without the pictures of the Trade Center actually being attacked and falling, the piece as a whole is beautiful in demonstrating assumed permanence followed by shocking absence. The photographer's intent was never to have a photologue just in case the towers were destroyed - it happened to turn out that way.
Would you be happier if the pictures skipped the disaster entirely, like it was some sort of immaculate event that the towers aren't in the later pictures? Is highlighting tragedy worse than glossing over it?
You might take a moment to go back and look at the piece in question, rather than scorning Jake for taking a more global view.
Hey, I know! Let's rename the Twin Towers to something stupid with pseudo-religious/jingoistic overtones, riot in the streets, threaten to boycott and insult Gothamist, and then wave our guns in the air and offer to kill any Dane Gothamist writer who dares to show face!
You all have been watching too much coverage of that stupid cartoon thing. It was horrible, it was frightening, it was murder. And yet, shock of shocks, those Towers were there for years before it happened, and they were beautiful, right up to the last. It's a sad truth that there's beauty even in murder, just like there's art to be found in blasphemy. Learn the lesson, or repeat it.
Jake -- thanks for the link. I appreciated the reminder of how it used to be, before.