feeling listless

Photography It occured to me again the other day as I watched the clean up operation still taking place in New York, that the reason this attack affected everyone on such an emotional level was because we could see it happen so vividly. In most disasters all we see is the aftermath -- the sunken boat, the crashed plane, the train collision. These all occur in anonymous places and if amateur footage appears its usually blurry and difficult to follow. But we could watch these buildings fall because as well as being offices, they were tourist attractions (and still are it appears). So now that we've seen news footage, and amateur footage -- how does the artistic photographer deal with the event?

Mark Hunt is one of the few photographers allowed back into the seclusion zone and is seeing it through the eyes of someone who trying to capture the moments on an emotional level, not to sell to the media but so that future generations don't forget. As Dorothy Ho writes for Photo District News: "Hunt photographed at 100 Church Street, just beside the fallen WTC 7. Inside, he shot a poignant image of a calendar, left open at September 11. The same desk is shown again, this time it’s whistle-clean. Hunt’s images are simply framed, revealing the story of the damage and the efforts of individuals tasked with bringing things "back to normal." Hunt's own perspective appears at his own website, and there is an archive of some of the images demonstrating that new hole in the skyline of New York.