Multimedia work dedicated to Simon Dedvukaj
The following is from a post titled, The Wound, on Van der Leun's American Digest. Read the full article here.
"Simon Dedvukaj, 26, Mohegan Lake, N.Y. janitorial, foreman, ABM Industries Confirmed dead, World Trade Center, at/in building"
For two weeks, my days and nights have been spent reviewing some 3,000 photographs I made of New York City in 2002. Of these, I will select about 200 for an exhibition in the southern California hamlet of Laguna Beach.
Laguna is a continent and a universe away from my New York of 2002, but I’ve had little to do with its beaches, galleries, and pleasant open-air cafes of late. Instead, it has been my task to select small slivers of time from another life and arrange them to tell one of the many stories of New York in that first year of its unsought new era.
Everyone who was in New York on “The Day” will tell you their stories about “The Day.” I could stun you with an eight figure number by running a Google on 9/11, but you can do that as well.
“The Day,” even at this close remove, has ascended into that shared museum of the mind to be placed in the diorama captioned, “Where Were You When.” The site has long since been cleared and scrubbed clean. There is even an agreement on the memorial which will, I see, use a lot of water and trees. “The Day” has become both memorial and myth.
Less is heard about the aftermath. Less is said about the weeks and months that spun out from that stunningly clear and bright September morning whose sky was slashed by a towering fist of flame and smoke. You forget the smoke that hung over the city like a widow’s shawl as the fires burned on for months. You don’t know about the daily commutes by subway wondering if some new horror was being swept towards you as the train came to a stop deep beneath the East River. You supress hearing over the loudspeaker, always unclearly, that the train was being “held for police activity at Penn Station.” Was that a bomb, poison gas, a mass shooting, a strike on the Empire State building? You were never sure. You carried a flashlight in case you had to walk out of the tunnels that ran deep beneath the river. Terror was your quiet companion. After the first six weeks you barely knew it was there.
From a post titled, The Wound, on Van der Leun's American Digest. Read the full article here.
