Thomas Hoepker - Watching the World Change - a Troubling Image

(Click here for the Romanian version)

An op-ed from today's NY Times (Frank Rich: Whatever Happened to the America of 9/12?) directed me to a troubling image. It's made by Thomas Hoepker, and David Friend speaks about it.

David Friend is the author of Watching the World Change, the Stories Behind the Images of 9/11. Robert Stone says about this book that it embodies the Buddhist wisdom about change, life, and the world more than anything written after the events of that day.

I was in New York that day and I would try sometime to tell what I felt. But the image made by Thomas Hoepker is so haunting, the scene is so schizophrenic, under the apparent tranquility so devastating, that I should leave here David Friend to comment it. David Friend started a blog related to his book, and here is what he posted on September 10, 2006:

Here is the image, by Thomas Hoepker of Magnum Photos, mentioned in Sunday's compelling Frank Rich column in The New York Times. Taken in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on September 11, 2001, it shows a disorientingly tranquil and schizophrenic scene: a handful of young people, as if on a lunch break or taking a breather from a bike ride. It's a kind of troubling picture, Hoepker says in Watching the World Change. The sun was shining....It's possible they lost people and cared. But the idyllic quality turned me off.
It took the photographer four years before he felt inclined to publish it, fearing that the image, if shown too soon after the attacks, might have invited certain complacency in the viewer, instead of the outrage or anguish the situation demanded. Indeed, the picture's postmodern stasis didn't meet any of our standard expectations of what a September 11 photograph should look like.
Over time, with perspective, it grew in importance, Hoepker now says. It's a very contemporary picture: The bright colors are up front, but it has that touch of neutrality, coolness, a bit of a distance to suffering and not trusting of emotions.... It took a while for the news to sink in. It took a while to know how to react.

(New York, New York)