In his cover for the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Pascal Campion depicts two people, likely too young to have experienced the day firsthand, sharing a moment of comfort and consolation on the rebuilt site of the World Trade Center. “Emotions can often be difficult to express in words,” Campion said. “But I’m a visual artist and, in my chosen medium, emotions can transcend words.” Behind the couple, the memorial reflecting pools, the footprints of the old Twin Towers; the wing-like silhouette of the Oculus, Santiago Calatrava’s gleaming shopping-mall-cum-transportation-hub; and the illuminated office towers that make up the present-day skyline. Life has gone on. And yet, almost two decades later, the surroundings remain imbued with the memory of the events that took place on that day and by the absence of what was.
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and in the days that followed, a black hole seemed to swallow everything that reality had rested on until that moment. I lived then (and now) downtown and watched with my family as the towers collapsed. At that moment, as the magazine’s art editor, the idea of coming up with an image—indeed, any thought of a creative act—seemed repulsive and futile. Yet The New Yorker was pulling together a special issue, and the magazine needed a cover by that Friday. I ended up drawing a black cover and adding, at the suggestion of my husband and collaborator (the cartoonist Art Spiegelman), the silhouette of the towers, just barely visible, in a deeper black. It was an image that contained its own negation. Its simplicity seemed to acknowledge the magnitude of what had happened. It allowed room for what couldn’t be shown, the unspeakable loss: the people trapped in the towers and jumping to their deaths, the firemen going up the stairs loaded with gear and heavy equipment, the hundreds of handmade signs with photos of missing people that appeared everywhere downtown within hours.
A year later, this cover by the Spanish artist Ana Juan showed a sky filled with absence, with just a sliver of buildings at the bottom of the picture. It evoked the shock that New Yorkers had felt the year before, on what had been a radiantly beautiful September day, when the skyline downtown was suddenly and radically altered.
For the second anniversary, the Turkish artist Gürbüz Doğan Ekşioğlu captured the feeling that overcame many New Yorkers when they looked at their skyline and did not see the Twin Towers.
In this 2004 cover, the Hungarian-born artist Istvan Banyai captured the unsettling way a spectral image—an inadvertent remembrance of the trauma—could suddenly seize those who worked in tall office buildings.
Five years after the attacks, as the plans for a memorial on the site were being finalized, the cover—painted by Owen Smith and based on John Mavroudis’s concept—showed a bird’s-eye view of the towers’ footprints and featured the high-wire artist Philippe Petit, the man who walked in the sky between the towers, defying gravity and bringing poetry to the massive concrete, glass, and steel buildings.
For the tenth anniversary, Ana Juan painted the downtown skyline at night, etching the memory of the towers in the most evanescent of traces, as reflections on water, an echo of what would be built in the endlessly flowing waters of the memorial pools.
By 2014, life had reasserted itself. In the cartoonist Adrian Tomine’s cover, Ground Zero has reopened as both a sombre memorial and a tourist destination attracting millions of people every year.
Between Friday, September 10th, the day before the anniversary, and Monday, September 13th, Pascal Campion’s commemorative cover, “9/11: Then and Now,” will be available for sale as an N.F.T., or non-fungible token, with all of the net proceeds going to the nonprofit 9/11 Day. The organization, which was founded in 2002, works with a range of partners, such as the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, Americorps, and the City of New York, to organize an annual day of community service in honor of September 11, 2001. The auction will be hosted by LGND.art, a digital-art marketplace that works to mitigate the environmental impact of N.F.T.s and offers a choice for blockchain minting with a lower-carbon footprint.
See below for some of the covers that we published in the wake of September 11, 2001:
Find Pascal Campion’s covers, cartoons, and more at the Condé Nast Store.
