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The Exceptionalist Optics of 9/11 Photography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2014

JOSEPH DARDA
JOSEPH DARDA*
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Connecticut. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

During and after the 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, thousands of photographs were taken. None, however, would become as iconic as Thomas Franklin's photo of three firefighters raising an American flag above the rubble of the World Trade Center. Franklin's photo, I argue in this essay, casts 9/11 in the familiar myth of American exceptionalism, screening out but still gesturing to the heterogeneous memories left unsettled and animate in amateur photographs, missing-person posters, bodies in pain, and performance. In considering the struggle over the visual memory of the attacks, I first consider how, in the wake of 9/11, the discourse of exceptionalism served to disavow the exceptions historically taken by the state and to rationalize the War on Terror. I show how this system of myths works in dialectical relation to other disruptive forms of cultural memory. I then read Franklin's iconic photograph as a screen by which traumatic memories are masked and onto which nationalist desires are projected. Finally, I analyze 9/11 photography that troubles the exceptionalist optics of Franklin's photo by evoking the visual legacy of the Vietnam War and so challenging the logic of righteous warfare.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 185 - 204
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2014 

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References

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11 Zehfuss identifies the danger in too readily embracing memory as a means of challenging the War on Terror. The 9/11 attacks were, she notes, construed as a singular “‘uncaused’ cause,” an event that necessitated a vaguely defined global war and yet was itself without a cause. This has allowed the “memory of the dead” to be used as a rationale for warfare and the vast surveillance of individuals within and beyond the United States. Zehfuss, Maja, “Forget September 11,” Third World Quarterly, 24, 3 (2003), 513–28, 520–21, 525–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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19 Sturken, Tourists of History, 190.

20 For more thorough analyses of how Franklin's photograph draws on and resituates Rosenthal's, see Helmers, Marguerite and Hill, Charles A., introduction to Helmers, and Hill, , eds., Defining Visual Rhetorics (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 1–23Google Scholar; and Westwell, Guy, “One Image Begets Another: A Comparative Analysis of Flag-Raising on Iwo Jima and Ground Zero Spirit,” Journal of War and Cultural Studies, 1, 3 (2008), 325–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Helmers and Hill detail how historical and circumstantial knowledge was integral to the rhetorical weight viewers granted Franklin's photo. Westwell shows how the legacy of Rosenthal's iconic photo was not always as secure as commentators might have imagined in 2001, having been reframed during the late-century rise of the New Right and by the cultural revising of World War II history.

21 George W. Bush, “Address before a Joint Session of the Congress on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11,” 20 Sept. 2001, The American Presidency Project, at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=64731&st=&st1=.

22 For further discussion of the origins of Cold War containment/integration policies, see Klein, Christina, Cold War Orientalism: Asian in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 24–28Google Scholar.

23 Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 16.

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25 Hariman and Lucaites, 17.

26 Franklin himself took 24 other photographs of the firefighters. Rosenthal took a posed photo of the marines after raising the flag. Friend, 318; Hariman and Lucaites, 97.

27 Azoulay, Civil Imagination. 25.

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29 Pease, New American Exceptionalism, 162. Spanos has also stressed how critical retrieving the “singularity of the Vietnam War” is to “challenging the United States' effort, based on its mythological status as a redeemer nation, to achieve global sovereignty.” Spanos, American Exceptionalism, xvii.

30 The cited passage falls within a larger theoretical project. Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire, 255, 28, distinguishes what she refers to as the scenario, a “reactivation” of the historical past that “bears the weight of accumulative repeats.” The scenario implicates the past in the present moment but also represents a space for the introduction of counterhistories and change.

31 Edkins, Trauma, xiv.

32 Sturken, Tangled Memories, 76, 78.

33 Young, Texture of Memory, xi.

34 Azoulay, 27.

35 Edkins, 229–30.

36 Gordon, Avery F., Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4Google Scholar.