Houston Street
All over town there are posters for the movie Cloverfield depicting a ruined lower Manhattan. For those of living downtown (or anywhere?) the images are chilling reminders of what happened in 2001. Is making a movie like this shameless exploitation? Yes. Should one avoid seeing it? Yes.
Woohoo! I thought I was the only one who thought this.
though I wouldn’t stop anybody from seeing it. it makes me feel repulsed, but so many people have bad movie taste.
It must have been awful being a witness to the horror of 9/11. Since you live in the Lower East Side, I’m sure seeing it happen was a dramatic experience. But as a photographer didn’t you feel obligated to document it?
I was in Amsterdam on 9/11/01. The phone rang in the morning, and an American friend in Berlin told me to turn on the TV. I then watched the second plane fly into WTC 1. I was already booked to return to NY a few days later, and as it turned out, I was on one of the first planes from Europe allowed to fly in.
My main concern at that point was to make sure that friends were OK. Jack Hardy, a songwriter and good friend, had lost his brother Jeff. Jeff was a bass player who had performed with many of us who were part of the folk music scene in New York. Jeff was also a chef, and had been in the kitchen of the executive dining room of one of the companies in WTC 2.
This post says a little about how I responded as a photographer: http://www.brianrose.com/journal/2007/02/new-yorkground-zero.html
I plan to continue taking pictures of the WTC site from time to time as rebuilding proceeds.