By Monique Montague
New York Life: Images After the Fall
A Solo Photography Installation by Gerard Van der Leun
Sunday, February 29, 2004, Artist's Reception 12-4 p.m.
Show runs through April 2004
Harlow's Fine Art, 332 Forest, Suite 7, Laguna Beach, CA
949/376-6075
The following excerpt is from notes Gerard Van der Leun made on the 11th of September, 2001 from Brooklyn Heights in New York City:
While showering I felt a vibration shake my building in Brooklyn Heights as if a subway train was passing deep below. I didn't think much of it. I'd felt similar vibrations before.
I was dressing when I heard the second plane strike. I turned on the radio and found out what was happening. I dressed, left the house and walked a block to the Promenade at the edge of Brooklyn Heights. A quarter mile across the river both towers stood crowned in flames sending up huge gouts of smoke.
You don't know what to think. You don't know what to feel. You are just reacting. The Promenade was jammed with people with more arriving. We stood stunned and speechless at the edge of the East River. Every so often, above the belt of flames you could see a small dot arc out and then plummet down. Later we learned those dots were people.
Then the first tower imploded and plunged, it seemed to me, straight down. An immense wall of black smoke seethed through all the streets between the buildings, surged over us on the other side of the river and, at the same time, clawed up until it took over the exact center of the sky.
Bright metal squares yards across whirled up out of the smoke like mylar confetti tossed out of windows at a ticker tape parade. I felt the sound before I heard it and it shook everything around me. I heard gasps and screams around me. Some people were turning away. Some were moving closer.
Then the smoke took over everything. You knew that anyone in that building was dead and many began to shake and to weep and to look around gaping at the others. After some time I walked back through the smoke to my house.
After I was in the house for a few minutes I heard another larger explosion. I went back out and down to the Promenade again, but this time I couldn't see the sky as I had before. This time the whole sky had darkened and, the wind having shifted, this fine yellow ash was swirling down the street. Not heavy, but everywhere around me. It fell for days settling down lightly on everything like a shroud.
Although the entire country was affected by 9/11, there's no doubt that those who saw, felt, and tasted the devastation first hand were affected in ways that have altered their lives forever.
Gerard Van der Leun is certainly one of those.
“Before 9/11, I was living the good life, working in the City, and was fairly Liberal in my views,” he said. “After 9/11, I did a 180-degree. It made me question everything I ever believed in. And I didn’t like the answers. It made me reexamine my priorities. And I didn’t like my options. It made me look at where I was in the world and in my life. And I didn’t like either location. Ultimately, it brought me here to Laguna Beach.
“My position with a major men's magazine had long since lost its luster, plus I was in love with a woman who lives here. So in November of 2002, I packed up my apartment, said goodbye to the job, drove across country, and haven't looked back. Except in these images.”
A longtime photographer, Van der Leun became even more obsessed with documenting New York after 9/11. “At some point in the months right after 9/11, I knew my days there were getting short,” he said. “But I wanted to take as much of it with me as I could when it was time to go.”
So from May to November 2002, he explored the city as he never had before. “I took pictures of signs, of parks, buildings, and people...always the people. I didn't even realize it at the time, but looking back, doing photography was my way of putting into form my love for the City that had nurtured me for so long.”
Van der Leun has an energetic intensity in person that translates vividly to his work, both his writing and his images. The photos capture, with stunning immediacy, a recovering city and its inhabitants in all their pain, joy, strangeness, and splendor.
The Unbroken Circle
“Exhibiting these images is a way to show what New York was actually like after the fall of the towers. We shared that year with fear. Pictures of our dead stared at us from walls and fences wherever we went. We called them ‘the missing.’ But as the year went on we made our peace with them and they with us, and we got on with the messy business of living.
“Some might say that I’m trying to close a circle, but what I found when I went out and really looked at the city was that the circle was never broken, only hidden for awhile behind the smoke.
“To show you – to make you see what I saw during my walks around the city in those months – would take a thousand images and an iron constitution. Instead here are a chosen few. I’ve selected them because they seem, in aggregate, to give a reasonable impression of my last days in New York, the city I had lived in and loved for the better part of 30 years.
“It is said that ‘there are eight million stories in the naked city,’ but that’s another lie. There are, if you could read the secret hearts of New Yorkers, eight million stories squared in that city. This exhibit is a very short version of just one of them.”
New York Life: Images After the Fall consists of over 200 images, but the format will not be strictly that of a formal exhibit. Instead it will be part traditional images that have been matted and framed, and part documentary using pictures and words. Pages taken from notebooks, scribbled notes, daybook entries, and images collaged with various ephemera enhance or frame the moment.
A show within the show will be comprised of twenty images taken from Van der Leun’s continuing project, The Eternal City, which he describes as follows:
“Working as intensely as I did involved, at times, taking more than 200 photographs a day for weeks on end. That meant I had to move to digital photography and leave the labs behind.
“As I worked with the shots in digital format I began to sense another city hovering around the edges of the actual city. It started as a couple of images where I asked ‘What will it look like if I do this?” but soon came to have a life of its own. I began to look for hints of something larger than the temporal city in the images and, every so often, something would emerge, almost as a gift. It was as if the images were telling me a story beyond themselves. I took down what they were saying and I’m still listening and recording. More than that, I don’t understand.”
East comes West
When Ashley LaJune, owner of Harlow's Fine Art, was introduced to Van der Leun through a mutual acquaintance, learned of his background in New York, and the thousands of images he had taken, she knew that his work was meant to be shown at her new contemporary art gallery, Harlow’s in Laguna Beach, Calif.
“We need to remember and honor those who lost their lives at The World Trade Center,” said LaJune. “Not just once a year, but always and forever. Showing Gerard's photography, which commemorates New York City on such a personal level, is just one way we can demonstrate our love and concern for all those who were lost on 9/11.”
Article by Monique Montague, a freelance writer in Laguna Beach, California.
New York Life: Images After the Fall opens Sunday, February 29, 2004 and runs through April 2004.Harlow's Fine Art
332 Forest Ave., Suite 7
Forest Avenue Mall
Laguna Beach, CaliforniaFor more information, contact:
Ashley LaJune, Gallery Owner
949/376-6075www.NewYorkLifeImages.com
Monique Montague is a freelance writer based in Laguna Beach, Calif.
