Photographing History in the Aftermath: A Lecture by Lori Grinker (VIDEO)
On the morning of September 11, 2001, photographer Lori Grinker left her apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and, on the way to the subway, saw the World Trade Center towers on fire. She ran back home to get her camera and began photographing. Later in the afternoon she was photographing bodies being brought out of the rubble when she noticed three firefighters walk from a sailboat with a flag. She ran back inside and up to the second floor of Two World Financial Center. Leaning on the edge of a bombed-out window she photographed as the three firefighters proceeded to raise the American flag over the smoldering ruins. That image has since come to represent a pivotal moment in history going forward, but the process of making it, getting to it, was more ordinary, like sketching before arriving at the “answer.” In this talk, Grinker will reflect on the logistics and chaos of her work that day and its connections to her larger body of work on war, illness, and memory.
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A New York native, Lori Grinker is an award-winning photographer, transmedia artist, educator, and filmmaker exploring themes of memory, identity, history, and home. She is the author of three books of photography, Afterwar; Veterans from a World in Conflict (de.MO); The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women (Jewish Publication Society), and Mike Tyson (Powerhouse Books, 2021). A multimedia memoir, Six Days from Forty, exploring the history of AIDS, gay rights and sexual identity is in progress. Her latest work, All the Little Things, explores memory, loss and love. She is the recipient of many grants and awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fellowship, the Ernst Hass Grant, an Open Society Audience Engagement Grant, Hasselblad Foundation Grant, the Center (Santa Fe) Project Grant, and a World Press Foundation First Prize. In 2005 she was an Ochberg Fellow of the Dart Center on Journalism and Trauma.
Photograph: Terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Portrait studio on Nassau and Fulton, owned by David Jang. Lower Manhattan, New York City, USA, September 11,2001. Grinker/Contact Press Images.