David Friend wrote Watching the world in 2006, 5 years after the attacks on World Trade Center. It is reprinted this year. He had wanted the time to have a global view, to analyze with surgical precision the images of 9/11 a recommended read, it makes one think.
The very moment it happened even children remember, everyone can tell exactly where they were and how the first images arrived, what they were doing and how they reacted. Visually september 11 was conceived by the al-Qaeda terrorists as a Hollywood film.These images have been seen again and again, a giant firework display to affect the spectators except that in a movie it is only fiction.
Watching the World change is as much a book as an intellectual analysis. David Friend collected most of the testimonies from men and women who held a still or moving camera on his day. The author cross checked the stories of Pavel Hlava and Jules Naudet the only one to have filmed the first plane in the first tower.
The first by fluke, the second from inborn sense of news. Wolfgang Staehle a photographer had posted a camera with a self timer on his window in Brooklyn, he immortalized the airplane in a triptych of a few seconds.
David analyzed all the informations given by the press photographers, amateur photographers and TV cameramen that stood near the World Trade Center, and on the streets of New York. The book pushed me I had to be curious of all the angles and aspects . It became an obsession. One should try to reflect and understand. Studying an aerial photograph of men in the rubbles of ground zero Tom Brokow a TV anchor man said look at them crawling it looks like a Sebastiao Salgado picture. This comparison made shortly after the tragedy challenged David Friend “why are images so important”. His book a DNA study of september 11 through photography is a fine analysis of the part played by images in such an event.
The Ex director of Photography at LIFE not only gives us a complete evaluation of moving images for TV and still photography for the press. He also takes photography from a medical lab considering the genetic analysis of the victims bodies as other images. But David Friend in spite of the abundance of informations does not loose the thread that gives the truth and integrality of his purpose. Even if photography is on the surface of time going by, it gives us a story a realistic representation of space and time at a given moment.
The visual impact of the destruction of the twin towers gives informations on the power of photography, of the dangers when it brutally touches human vision. Power of information, danger of aliénation.
On that day explain David Friend people could watch death live.Some have been traumatized. Photography on such an event is what remains in our collective consciousness. Many think and remember in pictures. Why is september 11 remembered more than any other tragedy? May be this time Goliath was hitting David, may be the gigantic destruction of sky scrappers, symbols of economic supremacy was too unbelievable to be real, so much so that for those who did not live it seeing would give them a bizarre feeling of surprise that only art work can give.
The Photographic approach of Jerry Spagnoli who immortalized the burning towers from his roof with a XIX century daguerreotype and made a vintage artistic print is a forethought that september 11 would be a unique event. something for which each and every one would have a vision. The Power of images cannot be assessed it was so in 2001 it is much so 10 years latter. Unlike images the collective memory cannot be controlled.
Jonas Cuénin
David Friend, Watching the world, Picador (2006).
