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Watching The World Change
David Friend
The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11
Picador
August 2011
On Sale: August 2, 2011
494 pages
ISBN: 0312591489
EAN: 9780312591489
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Photography
Watching the World Change is a gripping visual chronicle of
America’s darkest week, in which the stories behind the most
striking images of the towers’ fall and its aftermath reveal
the nature of our image-saturated society. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was the most
universally observed event in human history—with several
billion people seeing the two towers burn and fall on
television and the Internet and then in newspapers and
magazines. That the event was so visual is owing to the
people who, facing disaster, were compelled to take
photographs of it: imperiled office workers carrying
point-and-shoot cameras; horrified tourists; professional
photographers risking their lives; traumatized family
members; government officials charged with recording the
devastation and identifying the dead. Conceived by Osama Bin
Laden as a diabolical visual event—the toppling of an image
of America right before the world’s eyes—the destruction of
the Twin Towers swiftly came to be defined by photography,
as families posted snapshots of their loved ones, police
sought terrorists’ faces on security-camera videotapes, and
the Bush administration devised images of presidential
heroism to counter the chaotic initial moments after the
attack. In Watching the World Change, David Friend tells the
stories behind forty of the photographs that altered our
sense of our world forever—from the happenstance shots taken
by bystanders in the moments after the first tower was
struck to the scene of three firefighters raising the Stars
and Stripes at the site that evening, which has become a
ubiquitous image of American resilience. He tells
unforgettable stories of photographers and rescuers, victims
and survivors. He shows how breakneck advances in
television, digital photography, and the Internet produced
an effect whereby the whole world was watching the terrible
events at the same time. He explores the controversy about
whether images of 9/11 are redemptive or exploitative; and
he shows how photographs, and the human images at the center
of them, help us to witness, to grieve, and finally to
understand the unimaginable.
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