January 18–May 4, 2008

 

H A N S-P E T E R   F E L D M A N N   b. Düsseldorf, Germany, 1941

The destruction of the World Trade Towers in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, instantly transformed the site into a memorial and monument, a Ground Zero of searing memory that became a shrine and sacred ground. To broach the events that spawned the iconic images that dramatized the suffering of so many is to touch a living wound, to experience the vividness with which the memory of 9/11 still reverberates around the world. The traumatic images became the archival test for a media ecology dependent on short-lived iconicity, existing between spectacle and evidence. Today, to revisit the events in representation is to engage with how the images have become emblematic of the aftermath rather than of the event itself. How does one then revisit, not the event itself, but its aftermath, its mediatized manifestation? These are issues we must grapple with in Hans-Peter Feldmann's new project, 9/12 Front Page (2001), an installation (presented here for the first time) documenting the media response to September 11 through a collection of front pages of international newspapers published on September 12, 2001, a day after the horrors unfolded. Does seeing the events from the distant shores change its fundamental impact or its political and collective meaning in America? This is Feldmann's provocation. 9/12 Front Page addresses the intersection of iconographic shock and spectacle, exploring the terms around which photography mediates history, joining document, event, and image.

 

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