Memories Can't Wait

"The rising celebration of artists such as Robert Frank and Minor White heralded the movement toward more ironic or personal visualization of the mAmerican scene...Most historians of photography depict the movement toward self-conscious formalism as a natural and positive progression up the evolutionary art ladder (just as the "triumph' of American abstract expressionism was hailed as an improvement over social realism). The decline of documentary photography during these decades is much more complex than this summary. Documentary photography's decline and dissolution in the the category of quasijournalism, apart from the category of art, coincided with the disruptive social upheavals and politically repressive years of the cold war. New cultural and ideological conditions in the cold war years forced traditional presumptions concerning social documentary to become inexorably altered, regarded as suspect and even dangerous. This parallel between the decline of documentary photography and the rise of political repression is no mere coincidence--a red-baiting, blacklisting climate forced many artists to retreat into safer, more private realms."

Google operates as an a-historic machine. It creates its relevance everywhere but in terms of history. The same counts for Wikipedia, where the history of the contributions remains hidden on a lower level. For the dominant order of the web at this moment, the decisive factor is not time [contrary to modernism,] but density of links or relevance. There is only presence, and even the past is given as a present past.

In the fall of 2003, I moved my studio into the Woolworth Building, thanks to a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency to develop a project about the disappeared. From the window of my studio, which itself had been gutted and left vacant after 9/11, I could see Ground Zero and the de- and re-constructions that surrounded it. Most of Manhattan was taken with the debate over what, exactly, could be built in the footprint of the towers. In my studio, I had pinned up on the wall a copy of the list of special interest detainees, which was for many months the only document of their existence. I was worrying over the question of how to fill in those blank black spaces where first their names, and then their real lives and family ties, had been erased. How could I “give a face” to this issue, as immigrant rights advocates were telling me was necessary, when I wasn’t allowed to see or speak to the people I wanted to portray? The impossible trick would have to be creating a portrait of someone that would restore their humanity while maintaining their all-important anonymity -- whether legally mandated, as in the case of the special interest detainees, or dictated by fear of losing status or social stigma with former detainees and deportees.