This riveting photo document by Eric O'Connell of the World Trade Center bombing was perhaps the most difficult project I've ever worked on. Not because it was hard to do but because it was taxing emotionally.
I served the project as photo editor, and designer of the project prospectus, book, and logomark. It was paramount to me that I not interfere with the photographers story. By working closely with the Eric I helped distill the journey this experience had taken him on in the 10 years that passed. Though I was also co-writer of the text I took no credit because this isn't my story it's Eric's.
Designed to be an exhibit about the memory and experience – the phenomenological experience and remembrance involving sight and sound before, during and after the towers of the World Trade Center fell. Including movie images, soundscapes and unconventional display of the archival images.
The movement through the exhibit is at first, somewhat, and purposely disorienting. The images are hung on two walls, and on two sides, of three, square totems standing in the floor space. Images are hung on three sides of the totems often at unusual heights to reflect the vantage point in the actual photo. On the other two walls, projections, which will loop at disjointed intervals a series of images taken after the first tower fell and the air was thick with dust creating a dreamlike haze. The disjointed loops reflect the artists experience of constantly being overwhelmed that day visually, look left, look right, look up… On the floor are mounted three images, life size to the objects contained within them. Like the images on the totems they are mounted horizontally to reflect my experience. You must too look down, and investigate. Offering at once both a very literal version of the artists first hand experience while introducing an discomfort in the context of a gallery setting in that it disrupts formal placements for a photographic installation.
