Photography is my passion. To store my photographic work I use a software program called Lightroom. I have chosen to organize my photographs within Lightroom by date because that is what makes sense to me. For me, photography is something that happens continuously over time, not a discrete set of events or projects. When reviewing photographs in my LIghtroom catalog, this organization allows me to put individual photographs in context to what was happening in my life and the world at the time they were taken. When this review is done years after the photographs were taken, I often discover relationships and connections that I had forgotten or not appreciated at the time. This book illustrates one specific example.
From the summer of 2004 until the spring of 2006 I worked at the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan. The World Financial Center is immediately adjacent to the World Trade Center site. I walked by the Trade Center site every morning and evening on my way from the Fulton Street subway station. In my walks I noticed something, tour busses. The site of the September 11, 2001 attacks was becoming a tourist attraction. I decided to document photographically what was happening at the site. With a change of jobs and moving from the New York area it has taken some time to get back to this project. When reviewing my Lightroom catalog for photographs of the Trade Center I made a discovery. The first two, seemingly unconnected, images in this book sit next to each other in the catalog. I had forgotten that I visited the Natural History Museum in New York City on September 9, 2001. The last photograph of that trip was a serene sunset scene of the Tappan Zee Bridge on the Hudson River. The last image of this book was taken just 13 days later and has a strikingly different mood that reflects the changes brought on by the events of September 11, 2001. The images in-between document how we have chosen to memorialize the events of that day.