9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster

The collision of the jet passenger planes with the Twin Towers, their subsequent collapse into nothingness, the ominous absence within the smoke-filled skyline, the busy streets of Manhattan turned disaster movie – these scenes were images as much or more than actual events.¹ The hard truth of this realization came less than a week after the attacks when Karlheinz Stockhausen described the disaster as “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos” and once again on the eve of the one-year anniversary of 9/11 when Damien Hirst expressed his admiration for the terrorists’ ability to create such...

As the first year that digital cameras outsold their analog counterparts, 2001 marked a tipping point in the digital turn, one that would forge a new relation between the medium and the spectacle of disaster.1 With its dematerialization into code and capacity for instant transmission, the digital format allowed photography, perhaps for the first time in its history, to satiate the desire for “live” images. As a result of this sudden acceleration of the still image, the cultural position and function of film photography would endure an equally profound redefinition. In an attempt to retain legitimacy in the twenty–first...

During the stock market crash of 1929, it was widely circulated that disheartened financiers began jumping from the windows of their Wall Street offices in record numbers. A London newspaper described Manhattan pedestrians’ having to wade through bodies of jumpers that “littered the sidewalks.”¹ Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco, who was in New York working on a mural for the New School, explained, “Many speculators had already leaped from their office windows, and their bodies gathered up by the police. Office boys no longer bet on whether the boss would commit suicide but whether he would do it before or...

From the early perspectival diagrams of the Renaissance to the modern models of city planners, the image of the empty city has historically operated as what Barthes calls “a pure signifier,” an empty sign “into which men put meaning.”¹ In this capacity, such images provide the “degree zero” of the built environment, that substrate of underlying possibilities from which the city is reimagined from a seemingly omniscient viewpoint. Despite the interventions of theory in the postwar era, it was the popular culture of the nuclear age that compromised the apparent neutrality of the image of the empty city.² Cold War...

The World Trade Center was targeted on 9/11 not so much for the number of casualties it would produce or the damage to the infrastructure it would inflict, but rather for the larger symbolic statement that the destruction of this iconic structure would make. As the architectural centerpiece of the economic capital of the world, the triumphant verticality of the Twin Towers succinctly embodied the global reach and selfassuredness of postwar American capitalism. Their unnerving gigantism implicitly guaranteed a future where such structures, though grossly oversized for the present, would eventually be the norm as the fruits of capitalism flowed...

For the first hundred years of their existence, comics functioned as an art form whose abbreviated shelf life rivaled the ephemerality of modern media such as television or radio.¹ Born out of the nineteenth-century “circulation wars,” their serial format was aimed at transforming the casual reader into the regular customer and as such betrayed not only an incompleteness at the level of narrative, but a material disintegration which fueled the urgency of their consumption. However, as the form has gained credence among collectors, scholars, and artists in the last several decades, the planned obsolescence of yellowing newsprint has given way...

While the immediate aftermath of 9/11 saw Hollywood pull virtually anything from distribution that vaguely resembled the experience of that day, five years later in 2006 the event would be front and center in films such asUnited 93andWorld Trade Center.Writing in February of the same year, Julian Stallabrass noted, “There is . . . a vast outpouring of 9-11 merchandise that surely seeks to heal the image wound: posters of heroic firemen against the backdrop of the fallen towers, badges, caps, T-shirts, magnets and memorial candles.”¹ The cries of “too soon” seemed to have rescinded and...