Too Young and Vibrant for Runis: Ground Zero Photography and the Problem of Contemporary Ruin (Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs) (Critical Essay‪)‬

There is a photograph of the ruins of a place in New York City that no longer exists. All that remains is a gaping hole in the earth-the empty footprint of an obliterated skyscraper. Day after day and year after year, the hole confronts commuters from New Jersey with its barren, rubbed -raw edges. This photograph, however, takes the viewer back to that period when what was left of the Twin Towers still clung to Lower Manhattan. It is a tight shot of the standing remnants of the facade. Twisting in on itself, the ruin invokes a number of forms, besides the horror this image represents. On a colossal scale, the ruin surreally resembles the kind of weathered, rickety, dune-running fence favored by beach photographers. The facade's delicate arches claim distant kinship with the monasteries burned down by order of Henry VIII some five hundred years ago. Even more fantastically, the building's shell calls to mind the exoskeleton of some monstrous, alien insect. In short, the ruin is an interloper into the Manhattan cityscape. These architectural remains twist and loom over a red-and white Coca-Cola delivery truck, which is somewhat dented and ashy but oterwise miraculously intact. Coca-Cola logo dares to jockey for prominence even with the ghastly ruins of the World Trade Center.This is indeed an American ruin. Yet the red of the Coca-Cola truck thrums with insistent life-pulsing through the deadened neutral color of the ruins, the rubble on the ground, and those heart breaking sheets of white office paper that blanketed the area along with the ashes from the inferno. The red truck almost seems to prop up the leaning ruin. The ruin needs support because the toxic smoke that hangs in a pall over the scene almost appears to be pushing down on the structure.