From Publishers Weekly
On September 25, 2001, an exhibition opened in a previously vacant storefront in SoHo, perhaps 20 blocks from Ground Zero. Photographer Peress, who had been photographing the city for the New Yorker, Michael Shulan (who owned the building where the exhibit started) and two friends decided to hang pictures of the city by anybody and everybody who submitted them. The exhibition attracted thousands of submissions, and many thousands more visitors, and has toured in the U.S. and Europe, including stops at New York's Museum of Modern Art and Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery. The slip-cased, 12" 8 1/4" book presents 720 color and 160 duotone (and mostly full-page) portraits of the city in crisis, with crisp printing and no captions. While many of the images may resemble those seen repeatedly over the past year, this assemblage feels direct without being voyeuristic. If it is heavy on the flags, it is because the city was festooned at the time, and the pictures convey an array of different responses, personal and political, to the tragedy. This book really does, in Whitman's words, contain multitudes.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-This book grew out of an exhibit and sale of photographs of the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center disaster. The exhibit began when Michael Shulan taped a photograph of the towers in a vacant Soho shop window. A friend encouraged him to post more photos and on September 25 the gallery opened for a supposed three-week run. Months and thousands of pictures later, the project included a Web site and the publication of this book. Like the show itself, this book contains pages of uncaptioned photographs, almost 1000 of the more than 5000 photos submitted by some 3000 photographers. "Anybody and everybody" brought photos; those chosen for publication were selected "to give the most coherent sense of the whole." The book opens with approximately 170 black-and-white photos; the hundreds that follow are in color. The pictures vary in composition, in viewpoint, and both in camera angle and type of equipment used. Some are macabre, some eerie, some border on the tasteless, and a few are beautiful. The book concludes with the most breathtaking and evocative piece in the entire collection-a two-page color photo of the upper reaches of the Twin Towers thrusting upward through a sea of clouds.
Dori DeSpain, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Dori DeSpain, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
