Tells the stories behind the photographs of 9/11, discusses the controversy over whether the images are exploitative or redemptive, and shows how photographs help us witness, grieve, and understand the unimaginable.
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Watching the world change is a unique and powerfully affecting account of the most universally observed news event in human history: the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.Imperiled office workers, horrified tourists, professional photographers, documentary makers who happened to be filming in downtown Manhattan that day: these were the people who, facing disaster, took photographs of it, and so placed the horror of the attacks before our eyes. Their images were beamed around the world immediately, so that two billion people watched the terrible events as they were happening.Here David Friend tells the stories behind the images that altered our sense of the world forever - from the happenstance shots taken by bystanders as the north tower was struck to the now-iconic tableau of three firefighters raising the Stars and Stripes at the site that would soon be known as Ground Zero. He takes us back, day by day, through the week after the attacks, reminding us that photographs were at once a shock to the senses and an anchor to reality - as distraught families posted snapshots of their missing loved ones, police sought terrorists' faces on security-camera videotapes, politicians used photo ops to project reassurance and authority, and scientists employed forensic photography to identify the dead. He explains how advances in television, digital photography, and the Internet, coming together at the turn of the millennium, made 9/11 an awful opening to a new visual age. And he explores the controversy over whether the images of 9/11 are exploitative or redemptive - and shows how photographs help us to witness, to grieve, and finally to understand the unimaginable.
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