Abstracts of Papers
Eddie Bruce:
Surviving September 11th or Snapshots in the Dark?
A Critical Consideration of two Professional Photographs as Portraits of Denial
Photographs, film footage, and other forms of documenting historical events help enable us not only to position history in our present but also to rearticulate historical narratives, imbibing them with new meaning. The tragedy of September 11th, the most documented historical event in American history1, has repositioned American identity within a number of conflicting discourses and narratives. It is the conflicts among these discourses and narratives that enrich our understandings of American history and identity, as they articulate a power imbalance and an otherwise silenced perspective on the American ideals that regularly assume the central discourse on American identity. The framing of September 11th in images, much like the framing of September 11th as a discursive narrative, was and continues to be a conscious, interpretive portrayal of events and not just a scientific documentation of facts. It is our task as historians, social scientists, journalists, and scholars to view these documents critically, to offer new insights as to how images related to the events might be used to reflect the past and to reconstruct current discourses as particularly American.
1 HBO Documentary, In Memoriam: New York City – 09/11/01, 2002.
A version of this paper has been published in:
Picturing America. Trauma, Reality, Politics and Identity in American Visual Culture.
Antje Dallmann, Reinhard Isensee, Philipp Kneis (Editors). Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007.
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