In Kevin Bubriski’s photographs there are no airplanes, no towers wrapped in smoke, no precise instant in which New York changes forever. At the center of the photographs are people who are looking, and this completely shifts the way 9/11 can be told.
In his World Trade Center Series, New York City, now part of the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bubriski photographs Ground Zero in the weeks following the 2001 attacks. The site is still marked by destruction, but the camera does not seem interested in turning it into spectacle. Instead, it pauses in front of those who came to look at what remains of the towers: men, women, children, people alone or gathered before the destruction.
It is in their faces that Kevin Bubriski finds the true measure of the event. The photographer works on the aftermath, when the event is no longer just news and begins to become memory. Shock is not represented, it is observed as it happens to someone else, the gazes are often turned off-frame, toward a point we cannot see, but their power lies also in what they do not show. There is no need to see the moment of impact, the smoke, or the collapse of the towers to understand that something irreparable has happened. The gaze thus becomes a kind of second image of the event, indirect but deeply human.
It is a particularly significant perspective also considering the enormous number of images produced on September 11. That tragedy entered the collective memory through photographs and footage that have become almost archetypal. Bubriski steps away from that visual grammar and chooses a more fragile image instead, that of someone who does not yet know what to say in front of what they see.
The photographs in the series are black-and-white gelatin silver prints. In one of them we see two women looking upward. One brings her hand in front of her mouth, as if holding back a word; the other keeps her arms crossed and rests her chin on her hand. Behind them, a third figure looks in the same direction. In another photograph, two elderly men are portrayed in close-up, one brings a hand to his face, the other holds his arms gathered on his chest. Both look off-frame, with focused, almost suspended expressions. The city remains in the background, but it is their gesture that fills the entire photograph: two bodies still before something we do not see. On their faces there is not a single emotion, but a suspension: disbelief, grief, bewilderment, at times an almost unreal calm. These are restrained expressions, far from theatricality, that convey the intimate dimension of a collective event.
He does not photograph only what happened, but the way eyes try to understand it. Because in front of what cannot be explained, sometimes, looking is already a form of memory.
His photographs were taken between October and November 2001, when Ground Zero had already simultaneously become a place of destruction, commemoration, and public observation. Kevin Bubriski does not photograph what everyone was looking at, but photographs the very act of looking, and in this shift, 9/11 stops being merely a sequence of familiar images and becomes a human experience that is harder to fix in place.
A face in front of a ruin does not tell only of an individual loss. It also tells of the moment in which a community tries to give shape to something that, until a few weeks earlier, did not yet belong to its own memory.
This is why Bubriski’s photographs seem to need fewer explanations than the more spectacular images of the attack. By not showing everything, they leave an empty space between the viewer and what is outside the frame. And it is precisely in that space that the viewer enters. In his photographs, then, 9/11 is not merely an image to remember. It is a gaze that keeps questioning what happened.
