It’s May 2014, and the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York will soon open its doors to the public. For the time being, visitors have to content themselves with glimpses from the exterior of the torqued, angular, imposing structure. Many can’t resist snapping a self-portrait at the site, notes an architect from Snøhetta, the firm that designed the building.
“It’s proving a popular place for selfies,” says the architect Craig Dykers, watching visitors capture their reflected faces melding with the scorched structures inside. “If we can get someone to smile or have a giggle at a place of such sorrow,” he adds, “we’ve done our job” (The Guardian, 5/14, 2014)
Dykers strikes a populist note as he considers how the space will be used, appropriated and perhaps even remade by its visitors: the “practices of space” Michel de Certeau hauntingly described from this very spot as the critic plunged from the top of the towers in an imagined “Icarian fall.” And yet it seems oddly inapt to gauge the Museum’s success on the basis of a giggling selfie. After all, what other modern site of mass death and destruction invites such a response?
When the Oxford Dictionaries named “selfie” its Word of the Year in 2013, the editors traced its earliest recorded usage to an online social forum in September 2002. Is it more than a coincidence that the word first appeared at the turn of the millennium, close on the heels of 9/11? Did the shared events of 9/11 permanently twin our self-image with conflagration and collapse, our “reflected faces melding with the scorched structures” as The Guardian puts it? The word’s first usage, appropriately enough, combined a scene of self-portraiture with a grotesque accident, and ever since, selfie has carried the mixed connotations of narcissism and overexposure, individuality and replication, the momentary and the ubiquitous. Origins tend to put us in an allegorical mind, so it seems fitting that the urquote not only obliquely indexes the millennium with its reference to a 21st anniversary, but also makes the selfie’s cheerful smile expose a rictus beneath, teeth literally slicing out through the lip:
Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer [sic] and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie (ABC Online (forum posting) 13 Sept, 2002).
The Purgatory Press is haunted by the events of 9/11, but is even more traumatized by the Bush years they ushered in. The catalogue of imaginary books published under that title includes two that have direct links to the attacks on the World Trade Center. One of those catalogue entries, titled “Chuck Banning, Self-Portraits,” describes the work of a photographer who persished at the site. The piece might have been titled
“Selfies,” but in 2009, when the piece was first drafted, the word was still relatively unknown (the book was released in 2013). We reprint the story here, on the occasion of the long-awaited opening of the 9/11 Museum.
Chuck Banning, Self-Portraits
Had he lived into this century, Chuck Banning’s career would have blossomed. The photographer thrived on catastrophe. We can only imagine him in Iraq in 2003, in New Orleans in 2005, on Wall Street in 2008, in Gaza in 2009. He disappeared, however, on September 11, 2001, attempting to photograph himself in front of the still-burning North Tower of the World Trade Center, no doubt with his signature smile.
Banning gained notoriety after his visits to Sarajevo and Rwanda, where he made the first of his infamous self-portraits. Clad always in a pale blue polo shirt and crisp chinos, the photographer stood with a broad, fatuous and blank smile in front of scenes of the most appalling wretchedness and horror. Of the photographs in this collection, the portraits from Rwanda are the most graphic and unsettling. There Banning benefited, so to speak, from the slow rescue and recovery following the massacres in 1994. In each of these photos, Banning’s smile is an obscenity that draws our ire. Is that enjoyment we see on his face? Isn’t he smiling in complicity? How else can he present such a look of contentment and self-satisfaction? Our reactions are not aided, on the contrary, by Banning’s public persona that is bland, cordial, banal. Like one of Jeff Koons’ cheerfully kitsch chrome sculptures, Banning’s portraits reflect our own distorted image in their glossy surfaces.
Banning has been called “a glorified ambulance-chaser,” “a postmodern Weegee,” and “an amoral peddler of kitch horror.” Jamaica Kincaid, reviewing Banning’s Rwanda portraits in The New Yorker, delivered a withering indictment of his “smug scorn for human lives strewn like the collateral damage of his own conquering vanity.” And yet such criticism seems all-too ready to identify Banning the author with the persona pictured in his photographs, an effect Banning himself fostered in his Warhol-like cultivation of a blank public image. One might instead see these photos as impersonal and ironic versions of the mundane spoils of tourism, such as critiqued by Kincaid herself in her essay A Small Place. Indeed, they fully corroborate Kincaid’s memorably blunt depiction of the typical tourist as “an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there.” As Kincaid has shown, tourists’ vacation pleasures exploit the cheapness of life in places they temporarily grace with their dollars. Banning’s portraits make such exploitation violently explicit, but by eliciting revulsion they tend to short-circuit our critical judgment. Strangely, in so doing they can make the viewer a kind of tourist; if a tourist is precisely someone who resents other tourists, to hate Banning’s smiling face would be a vain reflex of defensive misrecognition and our disgust a blind recoil from the proof of our own voyeuristic privilege.
In November 1998, Banning traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, where a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, had been murdered a month earlier. The hate crime drew national attention and Laramie became the site of heated confrontations between gay rights activists and religious homophobes. The fence where the young man was strung up to die became a meeting place and makeshift shrine for Shepard’s friends and supporters. Here Banning took the photo that led to his wider notoriety (32). The picture shows a stretch of fence piled high with a colorful riot of flowers, wreaths, notes of sympathy and protest placards. Several figures by the fence stand and kneel in poses that evoke figures of classical religious iconography, an impression heightened by a glorious backdrop of high clouds and angled shafts of sunlight. A young mother cradles a child, a pietà in overalls; a group near the fence suggests witnesses to the crucifixion. This allegorical dimension combined with the jarring anachronism of contemporary clothing makes Banning’s scene resemble a photograph by Jeff Wall. And yet unlike the latter’s work this image is not staged; to the left a group of mourners have turned to look in stunned disbelief at Banning’s smiling face, while one face among them is directed at the camera, and thus toward the viewer. The image is something of a miracle, and it is surely the photographer’s masterpiece. Reflected here among the figures in the scene are our own pious sentiments, our questioning of the artist, and our interrogating gaze. One cannot help feeling that the image is marred only by Banning’s vapidly smiling presence. And yet, of course, it is his presence on the scene that made this rich photo possible, orchestrating a complex play of visual perspectives akin to Courbet’s reflexive self-portrait The Painter in his Studio. And like Courbet’s allegorical painting, it displays an image within an image, a figment within a fiction, an illusion of reality conjured as if by magic by the artist’s “conquering vanity.”
66 pp.
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