A date personified…

I respect Eryk's coming to terms with these images… but have no strong desire to watch the piece having witnessed this 'event' that long long day that seems far away in a different life time. Feelings of anger are refreshed every time I ride over the Brooklyn Bridge to my studio which is 10 blocks North of the WTC… and at times I don't want to even attempt to relate
to people from other cities talking about THEIR experience. It's hard.

I erased my digital photos moments after I snapped shots of the first hole in the tower - thinking someone I knew was possibly hurt, dead or trapped. It didn't make sense for me to own these photos - seeing all the hundreds of people around me taking the same exact photograph..some guy behind me commenting on how he "didn't realize people fell so slow from a building"… Nothing made sense.

After realizing my friend was safe - I took photos of the great exodus across the bridges into Brooklyn moments before the last tower dropped. Thousands of people in utter disbelief walking into a new reality. Those photos were magically erased from the camera somehow… and maybe for a reason?

The last thing I wanted to do for months afterwards was see this image - this fucked up image that kids had on their cel phones in
some far away country. I still jerk up in bed when I hear loud trucks hit potholes on my street - the sound of that first explosion
is still ringing in my auditory vocabulary. I will never forget it.

I applied for a residency at the WTC just weeks before the attacks. In my proposal was a purely text based piece projected from within the buildings (strange parallel..). Obviously my proposal was destroyed … but even more important to me now - are the images I took from within the WTC to use in my proposal. These are images of people working, commuting, and the towers themselves perfectly healthy and vibrant. I may do something with these images someday. They are haunting and perplexing.. and possibly some of the last interior images of the Towers.

(my plug..ha ha)
…So to counter Mirapaul's comment about 'not much work has been done about Sept. 11th - blah blah ' my response at this point is to make something I feel is a positive direction or a diversion far from the sick media sponge:

http://artport.whitney.org

GoodWorld opened today. (http://goodworld.ws)
A way of erasing the media, the hype, and everything else in a sense.


Love/Peeeece

lewb@redsmoke.com