New York, September 11, 2001 - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 72

entirely clear up. Some time after this project, I attempted to purchase a QuickBird
image from the day that the National Museum of Iraq was looted, but DigitalGlobe
refused to sell it to me on the grounds that its release might endanger U.S. troops.
The attack on the World Trade Center was a very important event for architec -
ture, but not simply because thousands of people died in the destruction of two
tall buildings, and a number of others, as well. These were not simply buildings,
and they were not attacked simply as buildings: they were images.
The attack was an event that also has left us with a lot of images—it was an
event composed of a multitude of images, as Gilles Peress and his colleagues made
so clear in their Here Is New York exhibition and archive. 42 My interest was in
looking very carefully, as closely as possible, at just one of them. It has an archi -
tecture of its own, and it teaches us something about the architecture of the
event—and also about the asymmetry of the state of images between New York
and Afghanistan at that time.
InOctober2001,afterU.S.andcoalitionairstrikes
againstal-QaedatrainingcampsnorthofJalabad,
Afghanistan,JohnPikereleasedDecember1999
IkonosimageryoftheDaruntacampcomplex,
includingOsamabinLaden'sToraBorabase.
Pikeusedearlierimages,acquiredshortlyafter
thelaunchofIkonos,forbefore-and-after
comparisonswithimageryreleasedbytheU.S.
DepartmentofDefenseofthetargetedsites.
IMAGE: IKONOS SATELLITE, COURTESY OF GEOEYE
Architects wanted to “respond” to the events of September 11 by building new
memorials. For me, nothing was more superfluous. What we needed was to come
to terms with the site itself, not to hide from it by building something else. When
a reporter asked me about this a few months later, all I could do was point at the
missing: “Memorials seem to be our instant answer to disaster, and that's why no
one ever calls it a mass grave .... And has anyone really asked what it means to
build a memorial when you are still in the middle of the war? I think the site itself
is the memorial. This is a mass grave—the site is what it is.” 43
Having looked at a lot of imagery from Bosnia and Kosovo and then the scarred
landscapes of apartheid South Africa, I guess I approached these images with a
certain context in mind. In a sense, I went from one mass grave to another, but
not intentionally. Graves simply need markers, and more than anything else, that's
what the image did for me: it did not reveal a lot, it did not fill us with awe, it just
marked the spot, one of the spots, where something happened.