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The subtitle to David Friend's book "Watching the World Change" is "The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11." An understated introduction to a book of wrenching sorrow and tragedy, this title aptly leads to the tone of how the book tells its story. Featured on the jacket cover right underneath the title is a photo of a lone figure, a man, just outrunning the dust cloud that enveloped the city as the Twin Towers fell. In the man's hand, he holds a camera. This photo, like all the others featured in the book, has its own story to tell. These photos are the focal point on which this book aims its vision. Anytime I read a book that features a photo display in its center, I look through the photos first, sometimes not even looking at how the book jacket describes the book. Many times, the photos are a kind of an aside. After all, the person wrote a book, not a photo collage. They are asterisks and footnotes that can be perused at will, but are not central to the story. Not so in Watching the World Change: they are the story. What this book relays in an unsentimental but respectful tone is how the medium of the visual picture defined this day of horror. Using the day of the attacks and the subsequent week as a foundation to the body of the narrative, Friend relays how media, ordinary people, the government, and even the terrorists used pictures, still or moving to capture the essence of the day. Through interviews and photography, Friend describes how photography and videography acted as a catalyst to define 9/11, and how media such as television and the Internet made it possible for anyone in the world to experience the attacks as though they were there firsthand. He also relays how in many ways, 9/11 became a true demarcation between film and digital photography, the rise of eyewitness blogs, and the power of the photo in preserving immortality. In the power of the photo, those who were intended to be obliterated are instead commemorated. While photography is the main thrust of the book, this is no dry treatise about lenses, f-stops and shutter speeds. Friend evokes through the many perspectives he covers during this horrific day, how photos and videos defined the day for those affected, how it brought a measure of comfort, and for many, how it made the unreal nature of the violence real. He discusses the morality of the pictures as well, whether the endless "relooping" of the planes crashing into the buildings was rendering more traumatic than helpful. He focuses on the morality of taking pictures of those who jumped, fell or were inadvertently pushed out of windows on the higher levels, debating the difference in cultures between Europe and America and why one culture was willing to focus on one set of horrors while the other one focused on another. He talks of the photo mural of those "missing" in the aftermath, photos that surfaced after the towers' fall, and how that helped shape the city and its inhabitants in the early aftermath. This book was a horrific read, not horrific in terms of quality, but because the enormity of the scope's devastation. It was a book that in many ways I wanted to put down because of its subtle power to sock in its gut despite or maybe because of its muted tone. And yet, I couldn't not read it. Not because of any sense of prurient voyeurism, despite the focus on the visual media, but because it was a sense of wanting to find healing within its journey, a sense of wanting to experience the journey of the survivors with them in a sense of solidarity. Despite the difficult topic and its awful reality, I could only put it down for short periods of time. I read this book within a day. Friend, who is Vanity Fair's editor of Creative Development, sets his elegiac book in New York City, having been in Manhattan at the time of the Towers' destruction. For the most part, he keeps the focus of 9/11 and its aftermath in the setting of Manhattan and its environs, reflecting a powerful city on its knees in mourning but not defeated. The hunt for bin Laden and Abu Ghraib is referred to, and their relationship with visual media is explored as well, but for the most part, this book follows the journey of New York as it rises from the ashes of the fallen towers. A word of caution is offered here as a warning, as several of the pictures are very disturbing, as well as the coverage that Friend gives them. But in the end it is the photos that are more devastating than anything that can be put in text, as text can be manipulated to put a varnish on. No matter how much it is edited, Friend implies, a photo seems to speak truth and stays in the mind of its viewer. With that word of warning, I highly recommend this book. "Watching the World Change" is an outstanding and powerful read. |
