Yesterday two decades have passed since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York; an anniversary that, of course, has been commemorated with numerous events, one of them is the exhibition ‘The towers of the WTC: 51 years of photographs by Camilo José Vergara’, a collection of 52 photos that look back 51 years to pay tribute to the victims of September 11, 2001.
The series is dedicated “those who died and those who responded to the attack that took place 20 years ago“and the images that compose it explore the half century that has passed since the World trade center original.
An area that began to interest Camilo José Vergara, of Chilean origin but recognized as one of the most important urban documentary filmmakers in the US (in 2012 Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Humanities), back in the 70s, when construction started of the twin towers.
“I closely followed the construction of the towers, watching as heavy trucks brought steel or dragged dirt amid the noise of jackhammers and the clatter of metal. When they became the tallest buildings in the world, I saw them as a wild expression of wrong priorities in a troubled age.”Says Vergara.
“More than half a million Americans were fighting in Vietnam, and many parts of New York were crumbling, segregated, poor, and violent. This reality shaped my first encounters with the towers, and I tried to convey my feelings by photographing them with the homeless in the foreground, or in the sunlight that turned buildings into glistening leaves. It seemed impossible to think that I would survive them”.
However, Vergara counts as finally his initial resentment faded and he began to see them as great human creations: “As I traveled further afield to photograph the towers from distant districts, they seemed to lose their solidity and become mysterious, fantastic, and alluring. I liked seeing them in the background of my photos as they towered over houses, waterways, vegetation, junkyards, highways, and elevated trains.”.
Finally, “On September 11, 2001, the WTC area changed from a place of pride and power to a place of smoking debris and death. There has been a lot of rebuilding and renovation since then, including several landmarks designed by star architects that were built north, east and south of the land that the towers once occupied.”.
And it is that Vergara has not only photographed the area that became the original twin towers, but also the emergence of new skyscrapers that were built around the commemorative spaces (in the space occupied by the towers themselves) in order to honor those who died in the attacks.
“Few urban districts in modern history have been more discussed than Lower Manhattan, and the World Trade Center (WTC) […] the Twin Towers, which were widely criticized for both aesthetic and political reasons; many considered them soulless giants and arrogant symbols of US imperialism. But its destruction brought with it a kind of horror never seen before in the United States and unleashed years of wars and political instability in distant countries.”.
Today, Vergara reveals, “the tallest, darkest and most fortified tower, One World Trade Center, is disconnected from the monument, the museum and the rest of the complex. Now, many fear that a remote pandemic-spawned workforce will continue to stalk this largely empty district. And so begins another chapter in the history of the area.”.
‘The towers of the WTC: 51 years of photographs by Camilo José Vergara’
From September 4, 2021 to March 6, 2022
The National Building Museum
401 F Street NW
Washington, DC 20001 (USA)
www.nbm.org/
Cover photo | View west from the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn, New York; November 1979. Courtesy of the National Construction Museum © Camilo José Vergara.
All photographs by Camilo José Vergara, courtesy of the National Building Museum in Washington DC