Buried Negatives
By Gabe Maxson
26 Oct 2007
(NOTE: This photo essay originally contained 13 photos, many of which I hate to remove. I removed all but three and changed it to a personal post, as they are six years old and don't represent what I am currently occupied with. I might yet repost the rest, if anyone expresses interest. But here is the story.)
I took these pictures on my old point-and-shoot camera shortly after September 11, 2001. At the time, I felt it was terribly wrong somehow even to have taken them, and I waited a long time to develop them. Then I threw the bad drug-store prints in a box and forgot about them.
Tonight I found the negatives and had them scanned, and with the perspective of six years, I can appreciate them as documents. I still find them hard to look at. They record something of the chaos I and most everyone else felt in New York at that time.
I'm not sure why I even went down there that day. I just picked up some film for that camera I hardly ever used and started downtown. No one without special permission was supposed to be allowed south of Canal street, but I kept wandering past checkpoints until I was there, and then I took these pictures, and then I went home and felt really awful. That's what I remember from that day...
The workers had placed things in the way (empty bus, tarp,etc.) where there was a clear view to the rubble, to keep people from gathering. Thus the pictures through the hole in tarp and through the bus windows: I was not trying to be artsy.
I'm posting these pictures more or less untouched, just a couple of crops. I never appreciated that little camera (an Olympus Stylus with a 35-70mm lens), but now, having just recently started to get into photography, I see it was pretty decent.
I'm glad I knew nothing about photographic technique then.
No responses
