I’ve put a lot more work into WTC, adding four new images and replacing a digital image with one from 4×5 film. One image is out. I’ve fine tuned the text and added a conclusion that goes opposite a 1978 image of the Twin Towers reflected in a pool of water. I think the book now has a much stronger last section.
Here is the concluding text:
Reflection
In bringing this narrative to a close I find myself equipped only with the most recent and tentative images, not yet resonant with the past. I circle ground zero with my camera dodging the drift of tourists who have made it a place of pilgrimage.
It seems sometimes, disconcertingly, that I am in the business of photographing things that precipitously cease to exist—the Berlin Wall, the Twin Towers.
New York moves forward, new towers rise, and a new generation claims the old neighborhoods. The rapidity of change rattles even the newcomers who feel history slipping through their fingers as they fumble for their keys.
Here is New York. E.B. White wrote about the city in another time of great anxiety: The sublest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. We who live here know that all too well.
Let us then look back at what is gone–reflected towers in a pool of water. Philippe Petit on a slender wire. The names. The faces. Rising steel. The beginning of what comes after.