Thomas Hoepker, Magnum Photos, 11th September 2001
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth,” stated Marcus Aurelius in the first century Anno Domini.
Except, he didn’t - a viral Facebook post in 2013 did. But he may as well have done. Plato would be weeping for his materially conceptualised ‘forms’ that concretised ideas and values in the metamodern 21st century - reality is more negotiable than ever.
Subjectivism, the de facto research philosophy of those of us who prefer the frills of ‘qual’ over ‘quant’ assumes that nothing possesses a guaranteed consistency of meaning, but images, in particular, are susceptible to this. In today’s convergence culture, they are more easily recycled, recombined and recontextualised. They are effective and broadly universal units of cultural transmission. In spite of this vulnerability to be repurposed as they are manipulated by communities of ‘prosumers’ (digital producers + consumers of content) images still tend to become era-defining and maintain some sense of ‘truth’, particularly where photojournalism reportage is concerned.
Thomas Hoepker’s image of the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York was only published on the 5th anniversary of the event and was (arguably) labelled the most controversial photograph taken on the day (Jones, 2011)
The picture shows us, in its foreground, a tranquil and idealised scene, as 5 young adults laze and talk on the riverside on a brilliantly sunny day in New York. However, in the background across the Hudson river, we see the recently mutilated skyline of the city. There is smoke billowing upwards into the sky from the World Trade Center towers. On the one hand, the image affirms the comforting continuity of everyday life, of the reassuring normality and continuity of banal interactions, in spite of spectacular anomalous events.
It is all too tempting to assume the laissez-faire attitudes of the subjects pictured from their body language but those pictured have been interviewed and feel they have had their attitudes misconstrued deliberately by Hoepker’s image and claim to have actually been in a profound state of shock at the event.
Regardless of the subject’s actual state of mind, the image has been interpreted as a metonym for the western attitude towards the suffering of others who are removed from our immediate frame of reference. The ‘conscious ignorance’ of the picnickers is an attitude that many critics have linked specifically to the American people (Sardar & Davies, 2002), suggesting that their “callousness” is merely symptomatic of their American identity (Rich, 2006).
Interestingly, Hoepker chose not to include the photograph in the Magnum Photographs book on the event because he felt it misrepresented the event and had no place being published in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Although Hoepker’s framing of the shot was obviously deliberate, Louis Masur argues that the “deviousness” of the photograph lies not with the photographer’s choice of composition, but in the nature of the photograph itself as a medium which by definition isolates the event and severs it from its original “context and sequence.”
The image, to me, is so powerful because it captures a (perhaps brief, or even inauthentic) moment of resistance to the society of the spectacle, and to terror itself. Immersed instead in interpersonal communication, the subjects turn their backs (both figuratively and literally) to an image that would be mobilised and used to justify countless atrocities over the coming years. In addition to this, the image may be a misrepresentation of its subjects, but it seems to convey some truth about the importance of continuing to live life in the face of an act of violence designed to paralyse and/or induce paranoia.
References
Jones, Jonathan. “The Meaning of 9/11’S Most Controversial Photo | Jonathan Jones.” The Guardian, The Guardian, 27 June 2019, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/911-photo-thomas-hoepker-meaning.
Masur, L. (n. d) How the Truth Gets Framed by the Camera. http://timothyquigley.net/vcs/truth-masur.pdf
Rich, F. “Opinion | Whatever Happened to the America of 9/12?” The New York Times, 10 Sept. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10rich.html. Accessed 24 June 2022.
Sardar, Z. and Davies, M. W. Why Do People Hate America? Cambridge, Icon Books, 2006.