visual culture viewer: Jonathan Hyman, Visual Response to 9/11

September 27, 2009

Jonathan Hyman, Visual Response to 9/11

A New Americana: Visual Response to 9/11

by Jonathan Hyman

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the American landscape was transformed by public acts of mourning and memory. At the attack sites in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, people created makeshift memorials with signs, candles, flowers, pictures of the dead, and other tokens of remembrance. But the memorial response to 9/11 was not limited to those sites. Like the shocking, unforgettable images of the burning World Trade Center towers, the emotional impact of the attacks spread across the nation and around the world, and along with it came the need to grieve, to commemorate, to respond in some way to what had happened. As individuals and communities grappled with intense feelings of sorrow, anger, fear, and patriotism, they often felt compelled to express their private thoughts in public, visible ways, using elements of the landscape -- buildings, cars, even their own bodies -- as their canvas.

Since September 12, 2001, New York-based photographer Jonathan Hyman has been documenting these memorial responses. He has taken over 15,000 photographs (digital and film), covering territory from Maine to Virginia and across parts of the Midwest. His images depict a range of subjects and artistic styles-murals painted by graffiti artists, farmhouses painted with gigantic American flags, firefighters with elaborate memorial tattoos. In contrast to official, permanent memorials, these images capture largely impermanent, spontaneous expressions created and encountered by people in their everyday lives. Hyman's photographs, together with detailed notes and informal interviews taken in the field, reveal the creation and evolution of a vernacular memorial culture and vocabulary around the events of 9/11.

To mark the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, Hyman's work was featured in two distinctly different solo exhibitions. The first, at Ground Zero in New York City titled, 9/11 and the American Landscape: Photographs by Jonathan Hyman was the first public programming by the Nation September 11 Memorial Museum. Curated by Clifford Chanin, the exhibit presented 63 large color photographs and was accompanied by a full color catalogue with an introduction by the author and columnist, Pete Hamill. The other exhibit, 9/11: A Nation Remembers featured 100 photographs and panel text by renowned memory expert Ed Linenthal,was hosted by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

* Shannon Perich, Associate Curator of the Smithsonian's Photographic History Collection, states, 'There are bodies of work that document the varied American responses to Vietnam, other wars, and national issues, but none with the same focus on the intersection between national tragedy, personal experience and public expression. Like Alexander Gardner's Civil War work, Hyman's is a rare and historically important group of materials that will sit as a central point of departure for September 11th imagery and the understanding of our era.

* Yale Sociology Professor Jeffrey Alexander remarks, 'This is a magnificent body of photographic ethnography that marks a major construction of the nation's collective memory. It will be looked at, and remembered, for decades if not centuries to come.'

* Author Pete Hamill writes, 'Jonathan Hyman's photographs remain as powerful in their way as anything that might rise from the ruined acres of the World Trade Center... they remind us of an entire time in our history. Not simply New York history, but American history. They will make some of us ache for years to come.'